Visionary Paul Otlet’s even forecasted today’s search functionality, calling it “consultation.” According to Rayward, Otlet wanted to “liberate” content from just the metadata of bibliographic files—to bring forth “what was of value or use in the content of documents by dissection or decomposition” for analysis and synthesis. This seems a prediction of text data mining: full-text searching to discover patterns and trends and to reveal new ideas across texts.
Here’s a visual of the Mundaneum from The New York Times:
LIS 653-01 Knowledge Organization 