Utopia in Conrad Gessner and Paul Otlet: historical approximation

The historical reflection on the nature of the field of the organization of knowledge and information: focus from a traditional reading of the history of libraries and librarians to become a history of the structural relations between knowledge, organization of knowledge and powers.    It is necessary to reflect on the role and figure of those responsible for the representation of documents and cultural products of each era. The Bibliography, as a discipline emerged in Modern Europe, corresponds precisely to this demand for maintenance of knowledge, giving it the necessary documentary stability for its diffusion. One of the paths that can still be traced concerns the search for a critical and comparative framework of the logics of organization of knowledge. What we want to focus on in this paper are some aspects of the Bibliography by the historical prism. For this, we will look at two figures: Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), Swiss scientist, scholar and bibliographer, and Paul Otlet (1968-1944), the "father" of documentary thinking.