Philippe Colombet

Google Books: this would have kept Otlet awake!

   
Biography

Philippe Colombet has joined Google Europe in 2006 and is responsible for strategic partnerships with publishers and libraries in continental Europe, mainly France, Belgium and Switzerland in the context of Google Book Search, a service launched by Google in 2004.
In 2007, University of Gent Library and Google entered a partnership to digitize 300,000 public domain books from the holdings of the library in the Book Tower.
Prior to Google, Philippe Colombet has worked for 10 years at Hachette Livre, a leading international book publishing group. At Hachette, Philippe Colombet was responsible for building electronic offline multimedia encyclopaedias in the early 1990's.
Born in 1966, Philippe Colombet holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from HEC Management School, Paris. He is the author of a business history book, Enterprises en revolution, Editions Jean-Claude Lattés (1990).

Abstract

Paul Otlet, born in Brussels on August 23, 1868, was the founding father of documentation because he created the Universal Decimal Classification.
Although he lived decades before computers and networks emerged, what Paul Otlet discussed predated what ultimately became the World Wide Web. His vision of a great network of knowledge was centered on documents and included the notions of hyperlinks, search engines, remote access, and social networks. We all grew up in a world where we either lacked access to books, or access to them in a timely manner. The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, were no exception. In fact, it was while they were doctoral students at Stanford University that they first imagined Google Book Search. They realized from their own experience as students that 1)  the bulk of human knowledge was kept in books, and 2) these books were difficult to find, scattered in various places in the world, and isolated either because people couldn't access them or didn't know they existed. Not only was this a substantial hindrance to their own research, but in the larger scale of things, they realized this was a serious drawback to the free flow of information and knowledge around the world. When they first thought of creating an online search engine to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, they had books in mind.