Otlet’s Order: Intellectual Property and the Bibliographical Imagination

Time: 12:00 to 1:00 p.m.

Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106

Event Type: Open to the Public

Fee: Free

RSVP Online: No Registration Required

“Scientific work, especially in our time, is specialized and internationalized.” As contemporary as such a statement sounds, it was in fact made in 1895, when the two Belgian pacifists and internationalists Henri La Fontaine (1854–1943) and Paul Otlet (1868–1944) founded the Institut International de Bibliographie (IIB) in Brussels. Otlet and La Fontaine knew that scientific work depended on access to scientific information, and for the next four decades they embarked on a massive effort to collect, organize, and disseminate the world’s knowledge. In her talk Eva Hemmungs Wirtén will focus on Otlet’s bibliographic imagination of patents as one top in a mountain range of documents, on equal footing with more familiar carriers of scientific information such as journals and monographs. Combining perspectives from law, information science, and mediated/material culture, how can we understand the ordering of scientific information in the context of past, present, and future knowledge infrastructures, and especially its relation to intellectual property?

Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is professor of mediated culture at Linköping University, Sweden. She has published extensively on the emergence and consolidation of international copyright and the cultural history of the public domain. Increasingly interested in scientific authorship and the political economy of academic publishing, the Brown Bag talk represents a direct continuation of a chapter from her most recent book Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information (University of Chicago Press, 2015), which considers Curie’s work with bibliography and scientific property in the League of Nations.

Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of CHF staff and fellows and interested members of the public.

For more information, please call 215.873.8289 or e-mail bbl@chemheritage.org.