Paul Otlet’s Traité de documentation presents documentation as a universal science of organised knowledge, arguing that books, records, images, diagrams, films, sounds, museum objects, catalogues, archives, and bibliographies must be understood within one integrated documentary system rather than as isolated cultural forms. His central proposition is that modern civilisation is overwhelmed by proliferating documents and therefore requires rational methods for collecting, classifying, analysing, circulating, preserving, and using information. Otlet names this science Bibliology or Documentology, defining the document broadly as any material support capable of fixing, transmitting, and reorganising thought. The work is visionary because it imagines documentation not simply as storage, but as an active infrastructure for intellectual cooperation, social progress, and universal access to knowledge. His case synthesis appears in the proposal for a Universal Documentation Network, a coordinated global system linking libraries, archives, documentation offices, bibliographies, museums, administrative records, and encyclopaedic repertories through standardised classification, shared cataloguing, and international cooperation. Otlet also anticipates later information science through concepts such as bibliometrics, documentary operations, modular records, encyclopaedic synthesis, and the aspiration to make information universal, reliable, complete, rapid, current, accessible, and available to the greatest number. In conclusion, the Traité is not merely a manual of librarianship, but a blueprint for a planetary knowledge architecture: where others saw books and files, Otlet saw a world system of documents capable of reorganising intelligence itself.
