Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (1868-1944), a Belgian lawyer and  internationalist, worked his whole life on the institutionalization of  knowledge production and dissemination. In 1895, he and Henri La  Fontaine created the International Institute of Bibliography in Brussels  to support the elaboration of a universal bibliographic catalogue and  related collections of images and documentary files. In 1910, they  brought together collections in the Palais Mondial in Brussels with the  idea to develop it into a global knowledge institution, comprising a  World Museum, World Library, World University, etc.: The Mundaneum.  Otlet envisioned Mundaneums in various cities over the world and a large  network of local, regional, and national centers of knowledge  production: Species Mundaneum.  The Mondothèque was one link in this hierarchical network. Otlet designed the Mondothèque  as a work station to be used at home to engage people in the production  and dissemination of knowledge. It contained reference works,  catalogues, multimedia substitutes for traditional books such as  microfilm, TV, radio, and finally a new form of encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Universalis Mundaneum comprising reproducible “atlases”  involving charts, posters, and other illustrative materials. The Mondothèque may be thought of as an analogue representation of today's ubiquitous computer-based digital functionalities. 

"The aims of the Mundaneum provide us with a renewed perspective for
modern search engine technologies. In many ways the projects are
connected. Google’s mission statement ‘to organize the world’s
information’ describes Otlet’s project just as well as it does Google’s.
The beneficial element of drawing these two projects into juxtaposition is simply to argue that search engines are not internet dependent and were attempted before our contemporary connected age. The aspect I find intriguing about the Mundaneum is that, even though it seems old fashioned with its employment of index cards and physical boxes of notes, and even though its aims seem unfeasible, it still sounds inspirationally futuristic, even today. The teams of workers designed to pick out the most important parts of documents, the human contact and
control when filing a request, seem at face value more sophisticated
than our current situation of secret algorithms and black-boxed methods.
Or are we also pleased that the world’s information is out of the hands
of individuals? Is the reduction of human bias or error in exchange for
the computational errors of machines a cause for celebration? If we for
a moment ignore the practicalities of the project and treat the
Mundaneum as an institution we might aim for, does it reveal certain
hopes and concerns we have for our current situation regarding search
engines?"

http://scimaps.org/mapdetail/mondoth%C3%83%C2%A8que_multimed_123

The mouse dreaming about his labyrinth

http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php/World_%2B_Brain

The agency of documents

H.G. Wells

[W]hat I am saying ... is this, that without a World Encyclopaedia to  hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of  reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and  transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles. (pp. 34–5)

http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~wrayward/Wellss_Idea_of_World_Brain.htm

Google and the world brain http://thoughtmaybe.com/google-and-the-world-brain/

anticipation, retro-projection

Google: assisted intelligence, not artificial intelligence