Paul Otlet

“ Written expressions of ideas, instrument of their attachment, their storage, their movement, they are the gatekeepers of all relationships between men. Their enormous mass accumulated in the past, increases every day, every hour, the new units bewildering number can sometimes be maddening. ”

“ Our time, of all others, is characterized by these general trends: organization and rationalization of methods and processes, machinery, cooperation, internationalization, considerable development of science and technology, concern to apply data to the progress of societies, extension of instruction at all levels, aspiration and latent desire to give all civilization wider intellectual foundations of the orient plans. ”

“ To make accessible the amount of information and articles given each day in newspapers, in magazines, to preserve brochures, reports, flyers, official documents, to find materials scattered in books, to make a homogeneous whole of these incoherent masses requires new processes, very distinct from those of the old library, to be applied . ”