“The technology industry in particular does not have a strong sense of its own history,” Wright said. “Partly due to the nature of the industry, which is always focused on looking forward for the next big thing.”

Alex Wright, author of “Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age,” began his session, “The Secret History of Hypertext,” by describing Paul Otlet as “a Belgian librarian who invented something kind of, sort of, like the Internet and was then forgotten.”

When we think about the history of the Internet, we usually don’t go as far back as the 17th and 18th centuries. However, the idea of sharing information through an open network goes back at least that far.

“The dream to organize all of the world’s information is not a new idea,” Wright said.

In the early 1900s, Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system with the help of his friend and research partner Henri La Fontaine. The purpose of the UDC system was to create links between topics that people could follow rather than being confined to the information on the pages of individual books. Their vision was to syndicate information to libraries all over the world, i.e. a global network for sharing information.