After several decades of slipping toward “obsolescence,” Ranganathan’s work saw a resurgence of interest upon the mid-1990s centenary of his birth and the sea change of online services. In the resulting decades, a resulting corpus of papers have adapted R,’s framework to a wide range of topics.
These papers, shorthanded here as “Five Laws for X” [FLFX], typically fall between two poles (“Lazy” and “Robust”), depending on:
An overview of words replacing “book” and “reader” in noun-swapped laws reveals an unsettling over-reliance on the term “user” for the later; And two papers whose laws depart significantly from R.’s linguistic template are discussed. I identify a significant lack of engagement with R.’s experimental literary choices in the FLFX corpus, and by extension, identify a broader incentive misalignment in modern academic publishing standards.
This report ends with a detailed analysis of an especially “robust” FLFX paper, Anderson, et al.’s (2019) The Five Laws of OER: Observations from Ranganathan.
Note: This report occasionally references an ontology Ranganathan developed in “the late 1940s and early 1950s,” which uses the Ayurvedic framework of the “soul,” “subtle body,” and “gross body” to characterize a document. I’ll explore this further in the next report, but here’s the gist: A document’s “soul” is the “thought-content”, the ideas themselves; Its “subtle body” is the thoughts’ linguistic expression (diction, syntax, etc.); And its “gross” body is its physical expression (a bound volume, printed on 8.5x11 paper in doubled-spaced 12 pt. Times New Roman, or viewed as a .mobi on a Kindle). [Ref: Soul, Subtle Body, Gross Body: S.R. Ranganathan’s Ontology of the Book in (Its) Context(s) (Dousa, 2024)]
The Five Laws of Library Science’s continuing impact is evidenced by a robust and growing corpus which, cribbing a tech-industry phrase, I will call “Five Laws For X” [FLFX]. According to Noruzi (2004) and Anderson (2019), the emergence of modern FLFX papers began with a resurgence of interest in Ranganthan during the 1992 centenary of his birth, which happily coincided with the mass adoption of online services.1 (Just a few years prior, Sethi (1986) described R.’s work as gradually sliding into “obsolescence” due to a variety of factors, including the “vicious influence of Western propaganda.”) Three decades hence, the FLFX trope has become so established that many papers include a near-identical paragraph listing the various & sundry fields to which its been applied. Hold my hand as we stare together into the ouroborosian gyre:
Based on Ranganathan’s laws, several researchers have presented different principles and laws. For instance, “Five new laws of librarianship” by Michael Gorman (1995); “Principles of distance education” by Sanjaya Mishra (1998); “Five laws of the software library” by Mentor Cana (2003); “Five laws of children’s librarianship” by Virginia A. Walter (2004); “Five laws of web connectivity” by Lennart Björneborn (2004); and “Five laws of diversity/affirmative action” by Tracie D. Hall (2004). (Noruzi, 2004)
…numerous researchers have successfully repurposed the Five Laws to relate to contemporary aspects of library and information science, including distance education (Mishra, 1998), web page design (Croft, 2001), information architecture (Steckel, 2002), digital libraries (Satija, 2003), online electronic journals (Khode & Khode, 2011), and the social construction of technology (SCOT) framework (Carr, 2014). (Anderson, et al., 2019)
Even today, these five laws can also be used in different contexts and redefine library research and services (McMenemy, 2007). Sen (2008) performed a study that revealed that these five laws can also be used in diverse context and formats and similarly by others (Gupta, 2010; Noruzi, 2004; Chudasma, 2019; Anderson et al., 2019) including the marketing of library services, Web, cloud computing and open educational resources. (Kaushik, 2021)
FLFX papers generally fall between two poles, with the majority clustering toward the former:
R.’s success in distilling the wording of his Laws into their most general, abstract, and punchy forms is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the Laws’ wording ignites our imagination and inspire us to service; But on the other, divorced from his book’s exegesis, an uncareful reader risks a similar pitfall to thinking The Declaration of Independence’s authors meant its second sentence to be understood literally. The Devil’s in the details!
------------------------------------------------------------ PAPER...............BOOK....................READER ------------------------------------------------------------ Anderson, et al.....Educational Resource....Student Cana, 2003..........Software................User George, 2022........Content, Container......User Kaushik, 2021.......MOOC....................Learner Khumbar, n.d........Digital Object..........User Noruzi, 2004........Web.....................User Valentine, 2010.....Item, Format............User Babu, 2011..........Links...................Surfer ibid................Search Engines..........Searcher ibid................Institutional Repo......User ibid................Resources...............Person ibid................Information.............Information User ibid................E-Resources.............User ibid................Web resources...........User ------------------------------------------------------------
Table 1
Table 1 shows the words which replace “book” and “reader” in a few papers that noun-swap the Five Laws. While “book” enjoys a healthy bouquet of transformations, the “reader” in has mostly become a “user.” (Alas, McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became A User lies unread in my TBR stack, so I’ll have to spitball.)
Part of this is likely concision and convenience: “Use” is a short word, and a linguistic superset that obviates the need to precisely define all the different actions one could take when (e.g.) using a website that includes multiple functions. This is, of course, lazy. Engaging with the definition process has the potential to tease out a user’s motivations, and group or subdivide users to add meaningful nuance and context to the arguments an author is making with their new Laws.
But there’s also something a unsettling about seeing this woolly menagerie of information sources, media, and institutions undergo a flattening of their significant differences to accommodate ingestion by a uniform “user.” If indeed “Books are for use!”, R. specifies in the 2nd and 3rd Law that the “use” they are “for” is “reading.” Lazy papers neglect to make a comparable distinction.
Of the FLFX papers I reviewed, two – both toward the “Robust” end of the spectrum – elected to form new, linguistically divergent rules for their particular subject.
This paper is often cited in other FLFX papers. Rather than adapting R’s Laws directly, Gorman presents a set of new laws addressing the much-expanded role and purview of libraries at the close of the 20th century. As a co-editor of AACR2 and the Dean of Library Services at CSU Fresno, Gorman enjoyed a lofty perch for his bird’s-eye assessment of the terrain.
Libraries Serve Humanity: Both in the personal and universal sense, i.e., “the furtherance of the higher aspirations of humankind.” “The psychological urge to serve is at the root of successful careers in librarianship and its psychic rewards are many.”
Respect All Forms by which Knowledge is Communicated: The explosion of digital formats in the 1990s caused no shortage of debate in the library world. Here, Gorman advocates for a clear-eyed assessment of each format’s strengths and weaknesses; and a strategy of incorporation rather than wholesale replacement.
Use Technology Intelligently to Enhance Service: Similarly, Gorman bemoans the technophile/Luddite dichotomy he saw forming in the library world. He advocates for seeking out technologies which solve existing problems, rather than deploying new tools for their own sake.
Protect Free Access to Knowledge: Gorman here means “soul” and “subtle” content; i.e., freedom of inquiry: “A society without uncensored libraries is a society open to tyranny.” An interesting lacuna exists regarding the practical acquisition of material; e.g., What is the “protect[ive]” responsibility of a librarian when the library cannot afford the material to which a patron should have free access?
Honor the Past and Create the Future: Once again addressing libraries’ headlong rush into the digital age, Gorman advocates for decision-making rooted in “a sense of history and a knowledge of enduring values and the continuity of our mission.” ¶ While The Five Laws is broadly forward-looking, R. traces the history of libraries from antiquity to the rapid growth of international (mainly European) systems of his day. He saw, in his time and place, the opportunity to lay the philosophical, political, and legislative groundwork for a thriving library system in his home country. Gorman, decades later, advocates for retaining this praxis of historical contextualization when envisioning library futures.
Frankly, I have many criticisms of this work – foremost among them, George’s reductive and IMO somewhat incorrect reading of the Five Laws2 – but I appreciate that they thoroughly recharacterized the Five Laws from the ground-up for “Generation Z:”
Put Content First, Not the Container. Information now arrives in multiple formats; ergo the mode of search and discovery should focus on the information content (e.g. the book’s “soul” and “subtle body”). This is a practical suggestion, but George’s statements about the universal availability of digitized content and the lack of user preference about a work’s “gross body” are flat wrong.
Information Quantitative Analysis. “A quantifiable evaluation is crucial in the digital age since Generation Z tends to think all the time logically.” [citation needed lol] Basically, George is advocating for data-driven analysis and decision-making strategies.
Additionally, George’s take on the Fourth Law (Save the time of the reader) clarifies something that’s been bothering me. Consider the following: “But this guideline makes it very clear: We have a responsibility to respect the time of our users since it is valuable.” (George, 2022) In The Five Laws, R. twice invokes the bromide “Time is Money;” to which Odell (2023) rightly asks, “Whose Time? Whose Money?” This “Fungible Time” (ibid) framework assumes a library’s end-goal is the minimization or elimination of temporal interface between the “user” and “information.” [Note: I’ll expand on this (and likely relocate it) during final revisions.]
The majority of FLFX papers have a similar fundamental problem: They replicate The Five Laws of Library Science’s most surface-level structural conceit (i.e. Five sequential Laws, condensed to their barest linguistic form) while ignoring the underlying – and significantly more important! – research, analysis, ethical philosophy, and literary practices which support the Laws. This is like focusing on the trophy itself instead of the skill and dexterity of the contestant to whom it was awarded. As a result, we find most FLFX papers denuded of political content, bereft of potent activism, and shorn of any shaggy linguistic experimentation.
Only a few of the most Robust papers quoted non-Law parts of the text. None of the FLFX papers I reviewed – even the Robust ones! – engaged with The Five Laws’ dramaturgy, either in replication or even just a passing mention; Likewise, a mention of its draft legislation was absent from all but one. It’s hard to overstate how odd this is from a literature-as-Literature standpoint: Imagine a serious academic paper discussing Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Danielewski’s House of Leaves without addressing their metatextual content?
Perhaps modern authors feel bringing up these stylistic quirks somehow devalues the seriousness of R.’s – or their own – work? How strange it is to be participating in an academic environment that canonizes a text whose writing style would render it unceremoniously rejected in its current publishing environment. Style requirements like APA and Chicago erect unnecessary barriers between the author and reader – ostensibly because standardization expedites the peer review process? This system implies a deeply back-asswords set of priorities.
“1930 was nearly a century ago! Of course academics don’t write that way any more,” you retort – to which I reply, “Yes, and there’s no reason to do it this way either.” Even Dogme 95’s co-creators had largely abandoned its heroic rigidity by the early 2000s;3 Syntactic standardization is critical for data interchange, but authors are transmitting so much more than data! Powerful moments can occur when conventions are unexpectedly broken, subverted, or jettisoned entirely; And we, as an academic community, are depriving ourselves of these moments. And for what? Expediency? Gimme a break.
Let’s end our FLFX discussion on a high note, by looking at a paper that really knocks it out of the park.
Anderson, et al.’s [hereafter, A.] introduction opens with a clear problem statement: The high cost of textbooks is creating a barrier between students and learning. “With costs often exceeding $1,000 per year, it is not surprising that many students choose to simply forgo purchasing them.” Throughout the paper, they cite additional studies exploring the extent of the problem, and discuss the broader systemic framework exacerbating it:
When attempting to purchase textbooks for their courses, students often report the need to purchase textbooks from sources other than campus bookstores, acquire used copies of textbooks, rent textbooks, share textbooks with other students, use a library copy of the textbook (if available), use older editions of course materials, and delay purchases or avoid purchasing the textbooks at all (Christie, Pollitz, & Middleton, 2009; Donaldson, Nelson, & Thomas, 2012; Florida Virtual Campus, 2016; Senack, 2014).
In seeking solutions, A. focus primarily (though not exclusively!) on Open Educational Resources [OER], a broad shorthand for free-of-cost materials for use in class settings. While the rewritten Laws use a noun-swap (Books -> Educational Resources, Reader -> Student), their accompanying discussions are wide-ranging, and follow Ranganathan’s method of identifying and rectifying systemic barriers to the Laws’ enactment.
The first law sets the ideological table by discussing the origin of the term “OER” in UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Coursework for Higher Education, and the 2007 Cape Town Open Education Declaration (supported by signatories like MIT, SPARC, Carnegie Mellon, etc.) to conclude that “access to information is a basic human right.”
Rather than shying away from the implication that money is a barrier to “use,” A. gamely discuss higher education budget cuts; Alternative strategies of corporate sponsorship or full privatization; And finally cite studies showing that “textbook publishers are particularly adept at exploiting the lack of choice in the supposedly capitalistic market surrounding education,” and that the burdens of blocked access fall heaviest on students already facing economic pressure. “Therefore, open education attempts to make education accessible to all by removing cost barriers for course materials.”
True to R.’s structural focus in the second law, A. state “academic libraries must first identify who their community is and determine whether or not library collections and collection development policies truly meet community needs.”
After summarizing research on the cost of textbooks, they examine policies related to Library acquisition of textbook and course materials (which in some cases “historically… prohibit their purchase with library funds or their request via interlibrary loan”), and efforts “in recent years” to implement “course reserves programs:”
some libraries even use their own collection development budgets to purchase required textbooks from campus bookstores and place them on reserve (Celik & Peck, 2016; DeMartini, Marshall, & Chew, 2018; Greiner, 2012). Just as Ranganathan proposed that libraries should purchase the costly and often inaccessible reference works that would be used frequently by their patrons (Ranganathan, 1931, p. 280), academic libraries’ support of course reserves reflects a renewal of the second law and provides a pathway for its connection to OER.
A. then take a moment to survey academic libraries’ position within the university hierarchy, and suggest libraries could “redefine their relationships with faculty and instructors and offer support during the course material adoption process.” The instructors, after all, are the ones delivering the “resource” to “every student;” Ergo, the library can facilitate this goal by using its staffs expertise to locate, assess, and collect OER material – the diffusion and variability of which may pose a barrier for instructor adoption.
Taking a utilitarian view, A. suggest OER creators and publishers begin with “offerings for ‘large enrollment introductory level courses’ that would have the greatest impact on most students.” Though OER content for more specialized courses may be less available, librarians could assist instructors, adjuncts, or TAs with the creation or revision of OER material to suit particular needs.
Opening with a spot-on take of R’s third law, which “focuses on the intersection of discoverability, equitable access, and the variety of information formats,” A. discuss later interpretations (as mentioned earlier in this FLFX report) regarding the provision of various digital formats, to “meet users where they are.”
The first paragraph includes a lengthy discussion of R.’s push for open stacks library designs, which couples with the second paragraph’s discussion of ideal digital-format qualities to support OER. Proprietary formats (Flash, Blackboard, etc.) pose barriers not only to access, but also revision. When selecting OER content, A. suggest university look to the CARE framework [Contribute, Attribute, Release, and Empower (Petrides, Levin, & Watson, 2018)]. Once again, the Library’s role here broadens and dovetails with that of the university at large and the instructors in particular, as our information system expertise positions us to effectively “steward” a university’s OER content, in both hosting and revision.
R. astutely twined staff-side and reader-side efficiency, and A. upgrade this idea into the wording of the law itself. After a fascinating discussion about faculty’s course material selection on students’ time; A. replicate R.’s nuts-and-bolts Fourth Law focus by identifying what procedures must be addressed:
The use of OER entails four main time barriers: (1) the time it takes to find OER, (2) the time it takes to evaluate OER, (3) the time it takes to create OER, and (4) the time already invested in another textbook or teaching material.
In 1931, R. argued that open stacks saves everyone’s time; We’re now in the “exact opposite” circumstance, “where an overabundance of OER can be overwhelming and difficult for faculty members to navigate.” The time-suck of not only locating but reviewing OER material may lead an instructor to stick with an expensive textbook for sheer expediency. And already strapped for time, an instructor may balk at the time required to create specialized OER content when none is adequate.
A. once again survey the system in which the library exists, stating that “universities rarely provide extra time or a reduced teaching load to support instructors in creating open educational materials, providing these would be a major incentive for OER adoption;” and applaud the “few colleges and universities offer[ing] programs that provide financial compensation and curricular support for time spent creating and evaluating OER.”
To facilitate OER discoverability, A. suggest libraries are well-situated to produce faculty-facing guides and workshops, and increase awareness of OER via their existing email newsletters. They suggest libraries could get involved with “OER organizations like OpenStax and Merlot,” which facilitate discovery and review. And finally,
In the end, vocalizing support for OER and encouraging universities and colleges to support OER at the institutional level is the best action libraries can take. Many faculty members have stated that “institutional support for the evaluation and adoption of OER would increase their likelihood to adopt OER” (Belikov & Bodily, 2016, p. 245), which is a logical and unsurprising claim. With a limited amount of time, it makes sense to focus on institutional priorities first.
Here, we find A. happily picking up R.’s advocacy torch, reminding Librarians to stand up and tell it like it is.
After discussing R.’s perspectives on growth and his “organism” metaphor, A. discuss the implications of OER’s primarily-digital character in the growth of its adoption in universities.
On one hand, many instructors and students find digital formats “unattractively nebulous;” but on the other, “Unlike other digital resources, libraries do not need to negotiate or pay for OER subscriptions.” But with acquisition comes the need for retention; and careful library forethought must be exercised to ensure stable OER access and capacity for expansion.
Astutely, A. envision the challenges that may arise when OER content with open licenses is modified. Practically, this involves disambiguation; But more seriously, it raises philosophical questions about the “ownership” of ideas, and includes the possibility that “the work itself may change in radical, unpredictable ways.” Thus, in planning for the growth of a university’s OER content, librarians must be both technical stewards, and effective advocates for open access / “intellectual property” policies.
Finally, the “open” in OER means that academic libraries have the opportunity to coordinate for a divide-and-conquer strategy. Libraries can play to their universities’ domain-expertise strengths, to the benefit of the whole OER ecosystem. E.g., U.C. Davis could specialize in assessing and creating agricultural material; MIT in computer science; University of Iowa in poetry; and Reed in interdisciplinary artwork. This collectivist working strategy is absolutely in tune with R.’s broad perspectives on the universal responsibility of a society to provide free educational resources to its people.
The more early internet history you read, the fuzzier this “adoption” timeline becomes; But the 1994 release of Netscape Navigator (joining the established “big three” walled gardens of AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve) is a reasonable year to use as the tipping-point.
George characterizes the Second Law (Every reader their book) as “every user should be able to find the materials they need and the library should be organized in a way that makes this possible,” which is more the domain of the Fourth; And the Third (Every book its reader) as its end goal rather than a mode of administration which creates this environment (e.g.) cataloging practices, wayfinding, etc. He characterizes The Fifth Law (…Growing Organism) as “the library should always be improving and evolving to meet the needs of its users,” when in the text, this law is primarily related to the de facto growth of library system.
“Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratization of filmmaking. For the first time, anyone can make films. But the more accessible the medium becomes, the more important the avant-garde. It is no accident that the phrase ‘avant-garde’ has military connotations. Discipline is the answer… we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!” (von Trier & Vinterberg, 1995)
Apparently Lennin’s spouse, Nadezhda Krupskaya was a librarian and heavily involved in forming the USSR’s public education policy after the revolution.
Somewhat related: Gen. Zhukov’s memorial statue depicts him on a horse trampling a smashed Reich Eagle. 10/10 no notes.
Guy Maddin’s new movie Rumours is (predictably!) excellent.
