A random Saturday when we
really had no idea what to do. Told myself not to make a ‘weekend progress’ for the winter sale.
I've been really curious about Mundaneum and wish to visit it.
So
today when I saw the door was opened and they had bright Chinese lanterns, we
decided to go inside, even it’s already 5 pm.
We
paid 5 EUR to see the Shanghai exhibition and it turned out not a very big
building.
In a glance it looked basically like an archive building with lots of boxes. Just
like in the old library. But actually, Mundaneum is beyond the conservation of collections and edited publications.
Decades before the creation of the World Wide Web, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine envisaged a paper archival system of the world’s information. In 1895 they built a giant international documentation centre called Mundaneum, with the goal of preserving peace by assembling knowledge and making it accessible to the entire world. When La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913 for his work as an activist in the international peace movement, he invested his winnings into the Mundaneum project. La Fontaine and Otlet collected 3-by-5 inch index cards to build a vast paper database which eventually contained some 16 million entries, covering everything from the history of hunting dogs to finance. Thousands of books, newspapers, small documents, posters, glass plates, postcards and bibliographic records were created and hosted in different locations in Brussels, the Palais du Cinquantenaire. Otlet established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph. Inquiries poured in from all over the world.
The Mundaneum is now located in Mons, and since 1998, with an exhibition space whose scenography was designed by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. In this place, past and present, exhibitions and conferences related to this exceptional heritage are regularly organized. An important commemoration of Henri La Fontaine is set in 2013, while in 2012 marks the beginning of a collaboration with Google, recognizing its origin as "Paper Internet/ Google".
The Mundaneum is now located in Mons, and since 1998, with an exhibition space whose scenography was designed by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. In this place, past and present, exhibitions and conferences related to this exceptional heritage are regularly organized. An important commemoration of Henri La Fontaine is set in 2013, while in 2012 marks the beginning of a collaboration with Google, recognizing its origin as "Paper Internet/ Google".
Back to the exhibition.. the theme was Better City, Better Life from an expo in Shanghai. It was interesting, with interactive and 3D tv, cool graphics and there’s also an interactive book about old buildings in Belgium.
065 31 53 43
www.mundaneum.org