the War, it rapidly lost favour. Once influential nationally and internationally, at least in a relatively specialised circle, Otlet came to be regarded as difficult and obstructive as he grew old. His ideas and the extraordinary institutional arrangements in which they had finally come to be expressed, the Palais Mondial or Mundaneum, seemed grandiose, unfocused and passé. In the early 1930s there was a quietly dramatic struggle to remove the International Institute of Bibliography, transformed eventually into the International Federation for Documentation, from this institutional complex and from under what was considered to be the dead hand of the past - effectively the hand of the still very much alive but ageing Otlet." In the wake of World War II, the contributions of Otlet to the field of information science were lost sight of in the rising popularity of the ideas of American information scientists such as Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and by such theorists of information organization as Seymour Lubetzky. Rediscovery Beginning in the 1980s, and especially after the advent of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, new interest arose in Otlet's speculations and theories about the organization of knowledge, the use of information technologies, and globalization. His 1934 masterpiece, the Traité de documentation, was reprinted in 1989 by the Centre de Lecture publique de la Communauté française in Belgium. (Neither the Traité nor its companion work, "Monde" (World) has been translated into English so far.) In 1990 Professor W. Boyd Rayward published an English translation of some of Otlet's writings. He also published a biography of Otlet (1975) that was translated into Russian (1976) and Spanish (1996, 1999, and 2005). In 1985, Belgian academic André Canonne raised the possibility of recreating the Mundaneum as an archive and museum devoted to Otlet and others associated with them; his idea initially was to house it in the Belgian city of Liège. Cannone, with substantial help from others, eventually managed to open the new Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium in 1998. This museum is still in operation, and contains the personal papers of Otlet and La Fontaine and the archives of the various organizations they created along with other collections important to the modern history of Belgium. Analysis of Otlet's theories Otlet scholar W. Boyd Rayward has written that Otlet's thinking is a product of the 19th century and the philosophy of positivism, which holds that, through careful