Documentary heritage submitted for inclusion in the Memory of the World Register in 2012.

The first work of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine in the late nineteenth century in the International Institute of Bibliography was to design a new form of bibliographic directory as a new tool to access information. The use of mobile forms, classified according to the universal language of the Universal Decimal Classification, allowed a faster and more efficient update of this tool and its use worldwide. The first example of dematerialization of knowledge, the Universal Bibliographical Index is now considered the first model of a search engine.

• Year of submission: 2012
• Country: Belgium