The Annals of Library and Information Studies [ALIS] is the “oldest and leading” English-language LIS journal in India. It was launched in 1954 by the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre [INSDOC]; which after a few mergers was renamed to National Institute of Science Communication and Information [NISCAIR]. Ranganathan was ALS’ first editor.
This special issue celebrates the centenary of R.’s appointment to Madras University Librarian, containing “studies by LIS scholars, both from India and from abroad, that discuss various facets of Ranganathan’s thought and its enduring effect upon LIS theory and practice.” The studies are divided into three categories, focusing on subjects that influenced R.’s thinking; His continuing influence in the LIS field; and considerations of “his legacy in light of the latest advances in the practice of information system design.” (Bianchini & Dousa, 2024)
This article provides a biographical sketch, and introduces a significant aspect of R.’s thinking: That knowledge arises equally from “intellection” (deductive reasoning; voluntary thought) and “intuition” (instantaneous revelation that “transcends the space-time matrix.”)
This article does important work teasing apart various (necessarily) intertwined threads of Hindu thought and describing how R. engaged with them. He cautions that R.’s views on these topics changed over time, and occasionally self-contradict. The philosophical influences of Hinduism are more readily apparent in R.’s work than the religious.
This includes an excellent discussion of the Western tendency to overlook how R. is viewed in his own country, vis-a-vis his nationalist contributions and his theoretical contributions. Broughton discusses R.’s “asceticism” and its relationship with contemporaneous nationalist practices.
My summary includes a lengthy discussion of the Colon Classification’s Main Class “Δ Spiritual Experience and Mysticism;” which reinforces the earlier discussion of “intelection” and “intuition”; And highlights significant pedagogical gaps when introducing R.’s Five Laws to Western LIS students.
R.’s book ontology derives from the Vedic philosophy of the Soul, Subtle Body, and Gross Body; R. presents it both as a 3-tiered system, and a 2-tiered system (grouping the Soul and Subtle Body, paralleling the Hindu reincarnation framework).
Discusses the continual presence of the sanskrit epic in R.’s work. For my purposes, this article generated several questions about incorporating literature as reference points in our current post-monocultural milleiu.
A quantiative bibliometric analysis.
Discusses R.’s perspectives on the European field of Documentation, which split off from Library Science in the late 19th c.
Concerns two knowledge-mapping strategies from LIS and AI, and how they might be combined. (Interesting topic, terrible writing.)
Along with a useful biographic sketch, this paper touches on several relevant aspects of R.’s work and philosophy for my research. Most significantly, R.’s ideas about “intellection” and “intuition;” in his view, both equally valid paths toward knowledge-gaining. The former is rational, while the later is the mystical “Eureka” moment where the knowledge appears fully-formed, independent of sensory perception and rational deduction and “transcend[ing] the space-time matrix.” The next paper goes into more detail about R.’s view of mysticism and spiritual experience, but this paper contextualizes these ideas within Ekavakyata:
The basic premise of Ekavakyata is the unity of all knowledge. The systems approach is a weaker form of this principle; mysticism and intuition are its main instruments. Its core tenets are that all entities in this universe are interconnected with one another and that, therefore, one should not view individual entities in isolation.
A tangent in this paper relating to “the very moment that our budding discipline was designated as a science, [and] skeptics raised doubts about whether it indeed served such a status.” Passive voice: Designated by who? Who were the skeptics? We find a tangential mention of the Chicago School’s 1930 declaration; which I’ll need to look into.
The upshot for me is providing a framework for describing the systems Esoteric Computing is looking to build: Our current digital library infrastructure is catering only to “intellection” – we are neglecting to build systems catering to the equally meaningful knowledge-creation strategy of “intuition.”
Broughton warns us that R.’s description of his religious, philosophical, mystical, and other esoteric both evolved and occasionally self-contradicted.
“While it is agreed that Ranganathan’s religious beliefs are not apparent from his writings, his use of Indian philosophical methods is more evident.” Broughton again provides some helpful compare-and-contrast with Western systems; Citing, in a broad sense, a sort of transcendence or “liberation from the world of time, change, and rebirth” as the end-goal of these philosophical pursuits.
R.’s unusually humble lifestyle occasionally “led many Indian commentators to regard him as a mystic, although that was not the case and he himself repudiated it.” Other contemporaries of R., referencing referencing bhakti principles, described him as a “Karma Yogi”; That is, one who works toward “liberation” by “yoking” himself to acts or works – in R.’s case, his single-minded focus on Library science.
Interestingly, Yogeshwar reports R. adopted traditional Indian dress and grooming (which he maintained while in England) after attending a c. 1930 talk by Ghandi, whose push for the use of Khadi cloth was an integral component of the Nationalist movement. Prior to this, and later in life, he wore Western fashions. Once again, Broughton points out Western readers often overlook that
R. was prominent as a public intellectual figure in Indian society… and he played a role in the political, social, and educational development of the country. Foskett speaks of how his appointment as a National Research Professor by the Indian Government “acknowledged the contribution that he had made not only to librarianship, but to the life of the nation.”
And that
identification with the Indian independence movement was central to his library theory. Ranganathan’s pioneering work of the 1930s challenged the ideological structures of colonial rule, advocating libraries and librarians as agents of a national political awakening, especially amongst the rural poor.
Because of his analytical nature, R.’s interest in astrology (Jyotisa) came as somewhat of a surprise to his Western counterparts – but the position of Astrology within the Hinduism’s classical educational framework (the Vendangas) renders it a fairly divergent practice from its Western counterpart. R.’s first scholastic discipline, Mathematics, “in some contexts is considered a subdscipline of jyotisa.”
Several sources report R. regularly held seances around 1934, using a Ouija board to contact the mathematician Ramanujan, about whom R. was currently writing a monograph. R.’s son “Yogeshwar says that the group of friends and colleagues who joined his father in ‘these spiritualistic or mystic escapades’ were all reputable scientists, and for “all of them, there was no link between religion and mysticism.”
The most relevant portion of this paper deals with the Colon Classification’s Main Class “Δ Spiritual Experience and Mysticism”; which sits at the exact halfway point in the classification, which (broadly) represents a spectrum from hard/evidentiary sciences to social/inferential sciences – or put another way, from “Intellection” to “Intuition.” (R.’s placement of the Philosophy and Religion main classes also notably differ from most universal classification schemes.) It’s indicator, the delta symbol, is a pictograph of the triangle/pyramid, associated with mysticism and esoterica the world over.
Class Δ was added in later editions of Colon Classification (I’m working from R.’s final 6th ed., 1960); and he includes significantly more opening remarks about this class than most others (typically, he’ll write a paragraph or two; Δ has two full pages of text). These remarks are striking and significant, characterizing mysticism as destined to become “the keystone in the arch” of all knowledge, as the human race progresses (significantly paraphrasing here) up the intellectual equivalent of Maslow’s hierarchy.
What does it mean that “The Father of Library Science” is communicating this to us so boldly, so directly? That his predictions have proven thus far somewhat premature? And that, pedagogically, we familiarize lIS students (however cursorily) with R.’s Five Laws, but not his Class Δ?
Beginning around 1948 and culminating with his 1952 publication of three inter-related volumes,1Ranganathan developed an ontology of the book that presages many later bibliographic frameworks (particularly FRBR’s “Work, Expression, Manifestation, Instance” model for Group 1 entities, outlined in 1998). R.’s ontology, however, was adapted from classical Hindu philosophy concerning each individual’s (jīva) Soul (ātma), Subtle Body (sūkṣma-śarīra) and Gross Body (sthūla-śarīra).
In the cycle of samsara, the Gross Body’s physical breakdown ends one lifetime, while the Soul and Subtle Body are reincarnated. Because its domain is the mind and voluntary actions, the Subtle Body carries an individual’s karma, and is responsible for its accrual and discharge between physical lifetimes.
Most often, Ranganathan presents a three-part ontology of the book, but occasionally condenses this down to two. The three-part ontology is presented as follows:
The two-part ontology reflects the conjoining of the Soul and Subtle Body during samsara:
In the way that the Soul and Subtle Body can cycle through a procession of gross bodies, a “work” can be transmitted into various “documents” (e.g., editions) and still retain its essential identity. This coupling of a book’s ideas and their expression emphasizes that, if one wants to write a book, expressing ideas through writing is the only way to do so.3 Many authors would probably argue the writing process itself is integral to the formation and refinement of a book’s “thought-content.” R. “underscores the unity between thought and its linguistic or pictorial expression by stating that ‘the expression and thought are inseparable,’ citing the opening lines of the Kalidasa’s epic poem Raghuvamsa.”
Dousa dismissively describes the Gross Body as a mere platform for the Soul and Subtle Body:
Of the three concepts, that of the gross body, or sthūla-śarīra, requires no comment, for, in both models, it serves simply as the physical substrate of the entity in question: just as the gross body is the physical body of a living being like a man, horse, or mosquito, so is the gross body of a book simply the physical object containing text and illustrations.
R. likewise suggests seeking out healthy, strong, atractive bodies: Heavyweight bindings and study pages that can withstand frequent circulation, and fascinating covers that inspire “bibliophilia.”
I take issue with this tendency to diminish the importance of the Gross Body; But my criticisms here extend tangentially from the central Hindu metaphor, stemming from two areas of my personal experience:
This is a quantitative bibliometric analysis, collecting “all works citing [The Five Laws of Library Science] in the Web of Science Core Collection,” resulting in “306 citing documents.” Several rounds of disambiguation and processing resulted in “81 keywords,” and six document types.
The citing publications dated from 1957 to the present, with “an increasing trend from 2005 onward,” accounting for 77.5% of total citations. (This comports with my FLFX research, most of which is found in the early web era and beyond. Also, note the citations/year graph resembles the total number of publications per year – e.g. we might be looking at an xkcd heatmap.)
English-language publications were the large majority (272), with Portuguese being the next highest (21). Martínez-Ávila, et al. trace this line of scholarship to Hagar Espanha Gomes, who from the 1970s onward produced “studies of and about Ranganathan’s classification theory from the Graduate Program in Information Science at the Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (IBICT), the pioneer graduate course in the ‘Library and Information Science’ in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Articles (206) were the most frequent, with Proceedings (26) and Others (24; including Editorial Material, Book Review, Note, and Letter) being the next highest. (Again, broadly comporting with proportions for the LIS publishing field generally.)
Martínez-Ávila et al. note:
The age of the work has not prevented it from being cited by recent journal articles, in which discussions about new trends and philosophical foundations for LIS are published, and this confirms that the book is a strong basis for work in the area and that is a sign of its relevance and connection to the current scientific discourse.
And I want to push back on this. My qualitative work on the FLFX corpus identifies a trend in The Five Laws-citing publications toward a reduction, haphazard treatment, or blatant misreading of its contents. Per my previous work on uncitedness, this once again reveals the limitations of quantitative analysis: We know when a work is being cited, but not why, or the nature of the author’s engagement with the cited work. I believe personally that R.’s Five Laws remains a deeply relevant work, but I’m concerned that its “connection to the current scientific discourse” requires an asterisk.
The network graph of authors cited alongside R. shows a quantitative representation of the lack-of-context I’ve been complaining about in the FLFX report. This graph includes a small cluster of co-authors representing a “thematically distant” body of work from the others:
J. Daniel Elam writes about anticolonialism (and the fact that the Five Laws were developed during colonial India is mentioned by George), while Kama Maclean and Ajay Skaria write about the history of India (both are cited by Elam). The point is that Ranganathan is cited as a historical figure in a book in which several authors are co-cited without being in direct relationship to Ranganathan’s discourse, only because they give a description and reference to The Five Laws.
Put another way: The majority of authors who cite Ranganathan (who are mainly from the LIS world) are unlikely to reference Indian historical or sociopolitical work in their papers.
Here we find a lengthy discussion of the Ramayana in R.’s life and work. The ancient Sanskrit epic appears frequently in R.’s writings and lectures, and informs, at an underlying level, the ideological grounding of his knowledge classification and The Five Laws.
One interesting quote from Kumar Girja’s (1992) Ranganathan: An Intellectual Biography posits that R.’s daily Ramamyana readings provided a much-needed break from his unrelenting work schedule, and that its frequent appearance in his work was perhaps from R.’s deep, repeated immersion in the book-as-literature rather than from a primarily religious standpoint. Girja posits the book held, for R., a kind of utopian ideal in its allegories and literary representation of animals, humans, gods, and inclusivity of rational and spiritual matters.
If that’s the case, what does it mean that so much of R.’s work incorporates a work of literature?
R. argues in his ontology that some books’ souls (see next ALIS paper) are so powerful they persist immortally; We are accustomed in Academia to giving deference to ancient epics (the Odysee, etc.) – but what if this preference simply arose from scarcity?
But what if instead we looked to our personal cannons? Is part of the immortal soul power of an epic its monocultural familiarity? And what about the breakdown of the monoculture following post-modernism? Is it “fair” to place the onus on the reader to “catch up” wi the author’s cannon? We permit this patience when engaging trans-nationally, so why not locally? Perhaps this is a benefit of digestible critical forms (33 1/3, BFI, AFI, Boss Fight Books, etc.)
From the U.S. perspective, this is a storm in a teacup. In the late 1900s, Europe developed a separate field of Documentation, which in the U.S. never calved from Library Science. At the time, libraries were primarily concerned with books-qua-books; While “Documentalists” were focused on journals, ephemera, and (broadly) the dissemination of new scientific findings; The end-game Documentalists envisioned was a universal shared catalog-cum-Wikipedia. Ranganathan’s argument against Documentation as a field aligns with the U.S. perspective; That is, the specialized metadata practices forwarded by Documentalists were more adaptations of existing LIS practices than a totally separate field.
This fascinating but horribly-written article requires the reader to slog through a soupy marsh of technobabble and meandering syntax.
Knowledge Organization [KO] and Knowledge Representation [KR] are two different strategies for making the unwieldy heap of human knowledge legible. KO is mainly used in library science, while KR is mainly used in ML and AI.
KO is divided into Systems and Approaches:
KR is divided into Artefacts and Methodologies:
Though their “high-level functionality” is comparable (e.g. Both KO and KR aim to provide a navigable map of knowledge), their differing approaches lead to significantly different output. KO is intentional and its output arises from a cultural lineage; KR’s output is emergent, and describes knowledge based on the particulars of its tooling.
Giunchiglia, et al. observe KO and KR’s respective strengths and weaknesses are quite compatible: That is, KO’s systems are typically lack technical emphasis, while KR’s methodologies typically lack considerations of the cultural context (e.g. “cannons”) in which knowledge production occurs. This paper examines the high-level correspondence between KO and KR outputs, and the feasibility of combining the two approaches.
Library Book Selection; Social Bibliography, or Physical Bibliography for Librarians; and Social Education Literature for Authors, Artists, Publishers, Teachers, Librarians and Governments.
The Causal Body (kārana-śarīra) acts as the bridge between the imaterial Soul and the material Subtle Body, but is not considered R.’s ontology.
To put this more generally: Communicating ideas is the only way to communicate them. Even conceptual art is typically “set down” in some capacity (e.g. Nam June Paik’s fluxus scores), Even short-duration ephemeral works must be brought into existance.
This has been a very busy week for me (aside from the election, which of course created its own strange weather). On Thursday, I presented with an Institutional Researcher colleguea at the 2024 California Assoc. of Institutional Researchers, where I was a total fish out of water – AFAIK the only representative from a library system.
This was an illuminating experience – for one, I assumed “institution research” was a lowercase phrase (e.g. I work at an institution and do research!) but as it turns out, it’s a very specific job title with its own baffling universe of acronyms (IPEDS, IE, etc). Representatives were there from the UC, CSU, CCC, and a few independent universities; I also became aware of some interesting undercurrents of tension between the UC and CSU systems, regarding the former’s status as an R1, and the later’s frustration that the legitamately difficult work of education is undervalued as compared to research. (Both of my parents were educators in the CSU system, so I’ve personally seen the herculean workload involved.)
Broadly, digital librarians and IR folks share a very similar set of tools and techniques (They’re all working in python, R, SQL, and tableau just like we are), but there’s some important differences:
All-in-all, it was a good experience, and an excellent opportunity to practice some new autism-related CBT techniques for managing adverse sensory environments.