Otlet and La Fontaine didn't just want a library; they wanted a "city of knowledge". In 1895, they founded the Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium—a pre-digital precursor to Google.
Using numbers that any person, regardless of language, could understand. universal decimal classification
In the late 19th century, two Belgian visionaries, and Henri La Fontaine , looked at the world’s exploding volume of information and saw a looming "Pit of Despair"—a future where human knowledge would be lost simply because it couldn't be found. Otlet and La Fontaine didn't just want a
To make this work, they needed a classification system that was: they founded the Mundaneum in Mons
The UDC divides all human knowledge into ten main "houses" (classes), numbered 0 to 9:
Able to cover every field of knowledge, from Philosophy to Engineering.