Today, the NY Times remembers Paul Otlet, someone we’ve never forgotten in schools of information and library science. Otlet, an information visionary, sketched out systems for search and interconnection of indexed data. Comparisons are made to Vannevar Bush’s Memex, with particular similarities between Otlet’s links and Bush’s trails.
If you’re interested in these systems, you might wish to check out the later work of Gordon Bell, whose MyLifeBits systems attempts to emulate elements of the Memex. While I’m not sure we’re going to see the emergence of the individual Memex, I believe we’ll see a Memex built from meshed data collected from mobile and ambient devices. This data, reassembled with positional data from personal beacons, would allow the creation of community Memex, a living, evolving street-view of one’s life.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
