ABSTRACT
Paul Otlet' ideas on documentation have attracted considerable scholarly attention since Boyd Rayward's pioneering work of over 30 years ago. Rayward's subsequent translation of selections from Otlet's writings precipitated publications that deal in whole or in part with Otlet's documentation, including further studies by Ravward. To understand Otlet on facts, it is useful to start with his distinction between natural and social science. The former builds a 'great monument' through disciplined. collective work. For natural scientists, 'speculation and interpretation are secondaiy. W. Boyd Rayward opens the introduction of his anthology of Otlet s selected essays with a passage from the Traité de documentation that envisions documentary operations performed by a 'collection of machines'. Among those operations is one that captures two ideas central to Otlet's concept of documentation: 'The creation of documents in such a way that each item of information lias its own identity'. Otlet wants to eliminate authorial subjectivity as an ordering principle for the signs of facts.
