While in India a wide acceptance of his writing has spawned further research on his contributions as well as imitation of his style, its acceptance abroad has been guarded and mixed mostly because of the unique manner of his discourse. […] Despite his towering and voluminous contribution, he remains somewhat obscure to the American librarianship and studied with an element of curiosity in library schools.
Put another way, “The library discourse of Ranganathan has been various described often in a manner not too laudatory. […] One cannot but venture to say that the uniqueness and originality of R.’s contributions would have probably received better acceptance if his discourse was more traditional and less loaded with his own cultural baggage.”
“He did not maintain any distinction between the life of mind and the life of spirit.”
This fascinating article traces aspects of R.’s writing style to
a specific category of Hindu scriptures and literature. While these do not jar the literary sensibilities of his compatriots, this manner of discourse does sound “quaint.” […] [H]is style reflect the use of the language as ritual in the manner of the school of Mimamsa, one of the six Hindu schools of philosophy. (References two articles particularly critical of the “‘peculiarity of R.’s style.’”)
Other critics have commented on his use of numbered or lettered section headings, “regarded by some bordering on extreme level of its usage.” Gauri traces this tendency to R.’s experience in mathematics, with its particular lexicon of logic in formal proofs.
It is not difficult to find a paralell of his style in that of sutra (threads of argument) style popular in some of the early Hindu philosophical and religious writings. This style is like a theorem or an aphorism put in very concise, limited, suggestive words and inavriably followed by commentary. Actually, commentary becomes essential because of the sketchy nature of the aphorisms.
For example, “Books Are For Use” is “no less pithy and concise than Pantanjali’s sutra (II. 15) ‘All is suffering for the sage’ or similar aphorisms from Four Noble Truths of Buddha (ca. 500 BCE) ‘All is pain; all is ephemeral.’” The sutra style itself “carries a strong connotation of a ritual;” for example, the intonation of a Mantra to “bring about spiritual ‘awakening.’ […] The use of sutra as ritual in the manner explained above is even more profound in the school of Mimamsa philosophy. […] Moreover, the goal was not ‘the discovery of a set of rules but also a set of metarules that would regulate the application of rules in various cases.’ The mere unquestioned recitation and performance of the rituatual was the goal which by itself might bring the right rewards.”
Gauri describes R.’s writing as “a formal style that always [sic] expressed in hierarchical and aphoristic manner in levels, chains and arrays.” Particularly in the text of the Colon Classification System, “there is an implicit and subtle connotation that classification by following the schedules based on fundamental categories, which are self-validating, should be followed unquestioned. This is no different from the stand maintained in Mimamsa that the truth in the scriptural statements and rituals is self-validating.”
R.’s “profuse use of parables and illustrations from the Hindu religious texts, invocation of ‘providence’ for his career growth and accomplishments, his frequent use of Sanskrit metaphysical concepts like ‘Ekavakyata’ – a profound Vedic principle of unity – unmistakably gives an idea of his overarching philosophy.”
In the Prologomena to the Colon Classification, he states, “The Five Laws (of Librayr Science) are like Lord Narayna (the supreme diety in Hinduism) resting on his leafy float on the ocean of Milk, ever watchful and ever alert, but abstaining from visible intervention except when the laws of the universe are overpowered by happenings not anticipated by them.”
This is an interesting piece; Sans-references and “more annecdotal than it ought to be.” Stiles describes the profound effect of encountering R.’s Colon Classification in the late 1940s, and his subsequent use of, and academic work on, the system in the early 1950s, with particular emphasis on the “Personality” facet. He describes two in-person meetings with R. in 1954 and 1956 in London, where he gave an impression of a warm “elder brother.”
Introducing R., Stiles provides a fairly typical western perspective on his life’s work:
Was he a philosopher? No. Mathematician? No… Systems scientist? No. Logician? No. One might go on like this, citing various disciplines, advocates who could claim him for their own. He was simply–a librarian.
Notably elided from this list’s named occupations are nationalist, policy drafter, educationalist, etc. etc.
But the thrust of this paper is dovetailing the author’s personal story with the development of his ideas about classification, and critiques of the increasingly-domain-specific classification strategies blossoming from the newly-sprouted information science field:
These newer activites [e.d. specialist classifications] … do not, like librarians, exploit the whole spectrum of learning. Yet it is in this respect that librarains have the advantage–without perhaps realising it. Truly they are the purveyors of the knowledge of knowledge.
This vigorous own-back-patting continues toward the paper’s conclusion:
Librarians as librarians seem in disarray these days, retreating before the huge advances in information technology. Is it possible that librarians will relingquish their grasp on classification, their lifeline? [emphesis mine] … Librarian, classify thyself. Order must prevail notwithstanding the formidable achievements of electronic automation. Order means general order, that is recourse to general classification.
In my view, the exploding world of material to classify has neccesitated different approaches than a global classification system – but more importantly, I’d also argue that for a great many librarians, classification is not just not “their lifeline,” it’s frankly not really important at all. He’s missing what I felt to the be fundamental experience of Librarianship, which has very little to do with “order,” and very much to do with walking beside people for a time; with building bridges from one place to the next.
It’s interesting that, from a job-description perspective, what I just relayed would seem most relevant to reference work; Speaking of which –
Later, [R.] cautioned us never to assess any enquiry in reference work as trivial. The degree of its importance rests only in the need of the person addressing the question.
– but let us take this idea of value-neutral service a step higher and consider what “classification” is designed to prioritize within the exchange between the librarian, the patron, and the library istelf. Conceptually, a clear, systemetized order allows librarians and patrons to efficiently locate material… but this is only meaningful if we assume efficiency is the end-goal. If we instead prioritize (e.g.) the experience of being in an open-ended space of inquiry; the varegated smells, paper textures, and bindings of books; the pleaseantness of the library; etc. etc. a librarian may may take a completely different approach to both reference work and the activity of classification itself. This runs up-and-down the chain of conceptualizing what a library is, and is for, and can have absolutely nothing to do with ordering information whatsoever.
For my money, the most interesting part of this paper isn’t the author’s interactions with R. himself, but a later section where a diversion into poetry allows him to extract the neccesary ideas to finally make an academic theory cohere (e.g., a study of “Walace Steven’s fixation with the Kantian noema”). In his paper, Styles includes “a catechismic poem” by Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” which includes this incandescent stanza:
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the gragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins
In ghastlier demarcations, keener sounds.
This paper covers some light specifics of R.’s studies at UCL, and the later impacts of his classification work on then-current library pedagogy. It’s unclear to me if McIlwaine had access to the articles later collected in A Librarian Looks Back; It isn’t cited, and R. covers his UCL studies in significantly more detail than is provided in this work.
Regarding the content of R.’s classes, McIlwaine states
Questions such as “the Electors in a Rural Parish desire to have the Public Library Libraries Act adopted for their paris. What steps must be taken to accompish this and why?” or “Summarize the import important conclusions of the report of the Carnegie United Kingdon Trustees on the Public Library System of Great Britain and Ireland (1921-23)” must have seemed totally alien and time-wasting.
betraying an apparent lack of understanding of the very real lessons R. drew from these sorts of studies and how succesfully he applied this knowledge in his prolific advocacy work and legislation.
Regarding Facet analysis, McIlwaine describes R.’s strength as digging into this pre-existing notion and teasing out “standards” for how the activity ought to be approached and practices,
often rationalising what was only instinctive in the work of others. … Many of the principles he propounded were simply a regularisation, with strict rules, of the more haphazard instrinctive approach of his predecessors.
Or to frame this a little differently, pushing Library Science further away from “art” and into “science.” Keeping this in mind, discussing current library pedagogy, McIlwaine observes
It is understandable in the pressure of time with closely packed postgraduate courses of one year’s duration that some of the traditional elements must be sacrificed.
To this, I might also add the inflexibility of graduation criteria further degrades the education process; e.g., when box-ticking overtakes the actual process of learning. Lacking a human-focused, holistic approach for assessing the depth of a student’s engagement with the acadmic process, institutions increasingly rely on ponderous and reductive practices like SJSU’s portfolio system for expediency’s sake.
(From my perspective, the most essential thing a prospective librarian needs to know is how to effectively justify their budget in a variety of different settings, and persuade purse-holders to forstay or mitigate further belt-tightening. In this context, a “final exam” would mimic this environment; where a student must present, in a variety of different media: A slide deck, a prospectus, text messages, tweets, 2-, 5-, and 20-minute long presentations, and – most importantly! – an emotionally-heated in-person meetings with explicitly antagonistic stakeholders.)
It does the next generation a disservice to send out into the profession people who are inadequitely equipped … to select classification schemes for specialised libraries with particular needs.
I agree with this completely, but also to an extremeity which its author likely did not intend: That is, including whether or not a classification scheme is even required, or if a new one should be devised specifically for the prupose.
According to Camaromi, “R.’s thought, particularly his Five Laws of Library Science, was discussed by library scholarls during the middle third of the century–usually favourably. The discussions, however, did not engender much action.”
[CCS] inspired a dialogue between R. and Henry E. Bliss, deviser of the Bibliographic Classification. The dialogue was touched upon by Susan Bury in her comparison of [the two]. But as neither classification was used in the United States, the classification thoughts of both men fell upon infertile sole.
Comaromi observes that discussions of R.’s work and thought were hampered by the US’ near-universal use of DDC and LCC. That is, in Britain and other parts of the world, robust comparative discussions about different classification systems neccesarily included CCS, introducing librarians and library students to R.’s unique approaches and modalities. These comparative discussions rarely happened in the US, because as a practical matter, classification seemed decided in the US. “A few library schools examined his ideas in classification courses. What was learned did not survive graduation.”
What R. did provide for library classification was a rationale and a vocabulary for classification construction. Facet Analaysis, as a term and as a working proposition in classification making began with him. Others before him used facet analysis, but neither consciously nor consistently. Western librarians did not accept R.’s own application of his ideas– [CCS] – but have come to accept his operating principles and much of his terminology.
Aside from Pauline Atherton Cochrane, “a seminal thinker and doer in American librarianship” and himself, Comaromi professes not to know anyone else in American Librarianship whos “professional thinking” is “guided by” the Five Liaws of Library Science.
Comaromi constrats the development of LCC and DDC; with the former developing along hermetic ideological lines, and ther later more freely incorporating ideas from other classifiaction systems; e.g., with revisions beginning with the 17th (1965) increasingly incorporating facet analysis, with traceable influences from R. The term “faceting” itself appeared for the first time in the 19th ed. (1979)
Referring to himself in third-person, we learn the Camaroni was actually the ninth DDC editor; After which R.’s faceting influence flourished unabated. The remainder of the article is a deep-dive into specific examples of DDC pecadillos which align or diverge with R.’s ideas.
The minutiae is interesting but unimportant for my inquiry; The significant thing for me is noting the quirks of fate can place someone with divergent interests into a position of influence; particularly, in cases like these, where their influence is greatest at the structural, rather than public-facing, levels. Had Camaroni elected, like the majority of midcentury American librarians, to gloss over R.’s work because of its lack of practical domestic use, R.’s ideas would not have later filtered into the DDC. This is, in my opinion, the best argument for increased exposure to (air quotes) impractical subjects from a pedagogy standpoint.
Note: Once again, this paper includes no discussion of the political context surrounding R.’s library work or his policy/legislative efforts.
the actual effects upon the practice of American librarianship are traceable to the intellectual itinerary: India to Great Britain to the United States. Actually, R.’s thought, particularly his Five Laws of Library Science, was discussed by library scholarls during the middle third of the century–usually unfavorably. The discussions, however, did not engender much action.
“outside India, Britain is surely the one where the name of R. is best known to librarians and where he had the most influence. […] R. was born… towards the end of the Vicrotian era, when the British Empire was almost at its acme, and he was brought up in the early years of the 20th century when the British Raj reigned supreme in India.”
“The development of railways, roads and bridges was opening up communications in the subcontient, but more important from the communications angle, the spread of schools and colleges was greatly extending knowledge of the English language.”
Author also has not read R.’s autobiography, stating “It is not clear how an unqualified and inexperienced person obtained this important post [e.g. Librarian of U. Madras]” – this is covered in great detail in his memoirs.
Clarifies the involvement of Bernard Ira Palmer, a librarian stationed near Madras during WWII, who specifically saught out R. because of his familiariaty with the Prolegomena to Library Classification. The two became fast friends. Later, Palmer became the Education Officer of the Library Association, overseeing
an ad hoc commitee of library educations, examiners and practising librarians whose remite was to refise the syllabus. Palmer saw to it that prominence in the new syllabus was given to the study of R.’s Five Laws of Library Science, the Colon Classification, and chain indexing.
Further, Palmer and A. J. Wells’ book Fundamentals of Library Classification (1951), which “immediately became recommended reading for students,” was described as “a restatement of the CC principles which focuses them on classification by DC.”
The remainder of this article is largely focused on R.’s Library Tour 1948, a major international outing where he visited six countries, and produced a work comparing and contrasting the progresses of these national library systems and the particulars of their national libraries.
NOTE! check out Dudley, Edward, ed: S.R. Ranganathan 1892-1972. Papers given at a memorial meeting on Thursday, January 25, 1973. London, The Library Association. 1974
This nuts-and-bolts article focuses on the particulars of R.’s plans and advocacy for the Indian National Library, and the influence of those action on other National Libraries. The majorty of this piece is beyond the temporal scope of my project, but the framing is relevant and worth relaying.
In his introduction, Humphrey notes that the “fascinating” and esoteric aspects of R.’s first-principles work in the Five Laws has perhaps overshadowed academic work focusing on his practical contributions; “that so much had been written about these subjects that I believed his fundamental influence on librarinship in his own country may have been neglected.” Already in 1992, here we have an example of a western academic pushing back against the reductive framing of R.’s work in the western literature.
“In 1970 R. invited me to come to India and Ceylon to deliver lectures in New Delhi, Trivandrum, Madras, Colombo, and Bangalore. […] I am now retired and back in Southeast Asia, in Colombo, Sri Lanka in fact. A single man’s impact on his profession is not easy to isolate and assess, but I do know that he had a tremendous effect on me, a young graduate student in 1956 and thereafter.”
Cochrane first learned about R. “in a course on the History and Theory of Cataloguing at the University of Chicago.” Traveling from CCS to the Five Laws, the Laws depth and succinctness traveled with her: “I have written these five statements on every blackboard in every classroom where I have taught and will continue to do so, because they offer me (and my students) the guidance and the rationale we need… These five statments have served as my guiding star throughout my professional career.” The elided center of this quote is a list of activities: catalogging, management, reference serverice, and so on – notably absent from this list is a discussion of the work’s template for political advocacy.
The remainder of this article focuses mainly on Cochrane’s area of expertise: The early development of digital library systems. This is great article from a design standpoint, and engaging with Cochrane’s lucid and creative extension of the Five Laws is a valuable excersize for the would-be FLFX author. One observation I loved was teasing apart the “objective” and “subjective” time of the reader: “While waiting in a queue to use a particular catalogue drawer, or to get a book charged or dischaged, although the objective time may be only a couple of minutes, it might appear as waiting for hours for the busy creader [sic].”
One particularly spicy section concerns the “structure of catalogue,” which, addressing what Toffler used to call information overload, asks if the present arrangement of MARC records (and – and I’m extrapolating here – the whole enterprise of MARC itself) has gradually become an active barier, rather than a facilitator, for information seekers.
“As a teacher of library science in 1955 I have been especially influenced by R. because he encouraged a critical attitude toward teaching and learning.”
Regarding the fifth law (“growing organism”):
If we are to develop library service, we must effectively control the system which facilitates the interactions between the reader and book. To insure propper growth we need librarians who are educated in such a way that they believe in facilitating this interacting in everything they do.
I love this quote so much! It does not define “effective control,” “propper growth”, or the nature of a librarin’s “belie[f]” – and, as a librarian, I feel my perspectives on these issues, while nonstandard, are worth pursuing. Sometimes less control is the most effective type of control; sometimes the propper growth is not in quantity but quality, texture, smell, or varieties of tea available to patrons; likewise my belief is that facilitating interactions can – and indeed must! – be refocused to incorporate human-centered and esoteric practices to provide the most holistically valuable experience for the reader.
“In the United States, we are engaged in a re-examination of the library profession, our work and our education, our relationship with other professionals in the information business. This creates an aura of crisis for some, but for others, it has helped to clarify how we can accommodate growth, change, new perspectives.” (wow!!)
The sections of this paper dealing with library pedagogy are fantastic, calling for essential, sometimes radical, changes. The suggestion I found most exciting was to couple library education with working libraries; e.g., the students would work in, and with, an operational library and actively work on research and experimental applications to the library’s present-day problems.
Not everyone in the West felt as I did about R. and his writings. Some felt they were too “Eastern” and incompatible with the modern Western world. His writings were filled with expressions and allusions they could not take the trouble to understand. … I hope this book and other being written about Ranganathan will bring a renaissance, enouraging present-day students to review his Five Laws and other writings.
Opens with a description of R.’s shift, in his first teaching position in 1917, from the traditional lecture model to the socratic method. These early experiences, and witnessing the role libraries played in the UK “reinforced his conviction of the value and important of individuslised instruction.”
The author Incorrectly refers to R.’s 1929 MALA-backed library course as “the first of its kind in India.” (see Sister M. Esperanza, above.)
R. insisted that rote teaching was unhelpful, “for the routine and techniques of today will be outmoded tomorrow. A trained librarian should be able to modify them from time to time during his career. Teaching of library science should therefore be creative.”
“It is neccesary to acknowledge the increased application or R.’s philosophical principles and his theories in indexing, in the creation of electornic databases, and in the development of integrated systems.”
“The effects of the Five Laws of Library Science and the invention of [CCS] were electrifying to the library world.”
“Garfield notes, from astudy of Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index, that R.’s works were cited more than 400 times over a 20-year period.”
“Compared to the sitution in ENgland, teaching of CCS has not been widespread in American library school. Thelma Eaton notes that library schools were not attempting to turn out students with a background in CCS for application. There was also no urging from the library school for the adoption of CCS in library. “
“Beyond the arena of pedagogy, Dr. R.’s influence has gone far deeper. Librarians on both sides of the Atlantic are trying to incorporate the principles of the Five laws of Library Science in providing various types of services.”
Looking through the library-related literature one can clearly see the evidence of the librarians’ efforts in this regard. The “reader” of the Five Laws is the “user” today and the “book” can be identified as all the formats of information sources. The bottom line today is “save the time of the reader user.”
Far back, in 1975, a resources librarian humorously tried to provide the American interpreation of R.’s Five Laws. Despoite its humor, the impact of the Five Laws in the western library world becomes very clear:
Garfield was, of course, the storried founder of ISI and Openheimer-like designer of the informetrics-driven attention economy in academia.
“Not only did he do more than any other single individual to modernise and profesionalise library science in India, he also had a revolution impact on international classification theory.”
R. was brought up under the influence of his grandfather, who was a school teacher, and two of his elementary school teachers. These men, who were steeped in Hindu religious lore, invested R. with a lifelong love of Hindu sacred literature that is plainly evident in his writings. Most of his library science works are liberaly sprinkled with allusions to Hindu scriptures.
This is one of the best quick-summaries of R.’s early life out there.
“nine-month stay”
“But positively impressed as he was” at British libraries’ community-focus, admitting and encouraging people from all walks of life, “he was dismayed by the welter of differet services, techinques, buildings, and equipment that he observed in the libraries he visited. He felt that each librayr was developing in its own independent direction, rather than all developing according to common principles. So R. set himself the task of defining [these]. ¶ These were published in 1931 in a seminal work The Five Laws of Library Science. R. himself considered this to the wellspring of the 50 books he produced over his long career.”
“Although the [Five Laws] might seem self)evident [sic] today, they certainly were not to librarains in the early part of this century. After all, the democratic library tradition we currently enjoy had arisen in America and England only in the latter part of the ninteenth century.”
For R. and his followers, the five laws were a first step toward putting library work on a scientific basis.
science!
“(Of course, the term ‘books’ here standard for all information items.)”
The paragraph summarizing the 5 laws demonstrates Garfield actually read and digested the book.
On CCS: “The more [R.] learned about the orthodox Ango-American library classification systems, the more convinced he became that they were seriously flawed. … R’s objection to the prevailing classification systems such as [DDC] and [LCC], was that they tried to emulate all possible subjects and provide preconceived pigeonholes to accomodate all documents. But this enumerative approach made little allowance for the addition of new topics. […] what R. sough was an entirely novel, more flexible, approach.”
There’s an interesting note here (“According to Bernard I. Palmer…”) regarding “enumerative” vs “analytico-synthetic” classification; specifically, the terms “pre-coordinated” and “post-coordinate” had not yet come into use, but that’s what Garfield is describing.
Although R.’s works on classification and cataloguing are his best recognised constributions, he published over 50 books and 1,000 papers on all aspects of library science. In addition he founded and edited three periodicals: Abgila, the Indian library Association Annals’ Bulletin, and Granthalaya (the Hindu component of the journal); the Annals of Library Science; and Library Science with a Slant to Documentation. He also involved himself in every aspect of Library work in India. In the course of his career, he was a member or chairman of more than 25 committees which addressed suchissues as library administration, eeducation of librarians, and library legislation.
“His first step toward achieving [a Western-style network of public libraries throughout India] was to form the Madras Library Association in 1929” –> This is not true; there many others involved.
“R.’s contributions were acknowledged many times over, both in India and abroad, by similarly honorary offices and fellowships.”
“During his 20 years of service as a librarian of the University of Madras, he took no leave.” This is untrue, he took 2 days after returning from England to manage his household affairs.
“He remained actively engaged in research until his death in 1972 at the age of 80. … When [Cochrane] visited him at his bedside one Sunday in 1970, there were ten or more Indian librarains who had traveled more than 250 miles to spend the afternoon discussing library development with him. This was a weekly occurance until his death.”
His impact in India is everywhere, widespread, indisputable, but
R.’s contribution to international library science, although significant, is more difficult to determine. [CCS] for example, is rarely used in libraries in the Western world. Even in India, where R’s ideas have had tremendous impact, the use of [CCS] is not as widespread as might be expcted. In American library science schools, [CCS] is usually covered only briefly. […] And although 50 per cent of the schools [which cover facet analysis] include [CCS] in their curricula, only about eight per cent (two schools) conduct any practical excersizes in it. […] Although, according to this study, the number of schools in which [CCS] is covered seems to be increasing, coverage is cursory.
Being his wheelhouse, Garfield cites SCI and SSCI metrics: “Over 400 publications cited his work over a 20-year period. Prolegomena to Libray Cassification, his comprehensive work on classification theory, is his most cited publication. But, for a number of reasons, these citations are only a fraction of what a thorough search would establish. … Still, when compared to other library notables, it is remarkable how often R’s work is cited.” Garfield requeste a portrait of R. in ISI’s “Cathedral of Man” mural.
“Regardless of the shortcomings of his system, it must be emphasized that R.’s work anticiapated the need for an automatic self-generating system of classification”
Note that G. does cite A Librarian Looks Back.
This excellent basic biography and introduction to R’s main areas of expertise.
Its 13 pages includes no mention of the British colonial system; His contributions and advocacy for the Nationalist movement are mentioned explicitly only in these passages:
“He also drafted specific legislation to extend the public library beyond the state of Madras into other areas of India. In 1950 [ed: post-indepdence] he published an influential work detailing plans for a system of national, state, university, public, and school libraries for the entire country… this plan was brought forward at the request of Indian gov’t leaders whom R. helped during the struggle for independence from the UK. He brought these men books while they were in prison. Later, when they assumed responsible position in the new Indian gov’t, they came to him for adise on devloping the nation’s library system.” (Also includes mention of his legislation work.) Note that this characterizes him as a somewhat passive participant in the nationalist movement, where the thrust of his work is obviously pro-independence and pro-democratic.
(Finks) “I first discovered R’s ideas in library school when I encountered the ‘Five Laws’ in the introductory survey course and the [CCS] in the advanced cataloguing course.” As a library educator, Finks regularly uses “the ‘Five Laws’ as a basis for my efforts to teach the philosophical foundations of the work we do.” (Finks 1981)
This is a quantative article! The second author is Frinks’ research assistant. Metholody includes “citation and content analysis”; They cite the excellent MacRoberts & MacRoberts, married biologists holding a lone torch in the wild for qualitative analysis in imapcts (they’re great!). Most of the citation stuff comes, naturally, from SCI (1972 onward), and Library Literature (from 1931 onward).
The methodology was designed to gaugue the appearance of R. in the American and Canadian literature; Regarding reviews, “evaluative” and “non-evaluative” papers, and citations to R.’s work in evaluative and non-evaluative papers. The authors used a drill-down method, staring by “counting the predominant topics of R’s articles and books formally cited in the articles and books making up the study population. [emphesis mine]” Already we can see a potential problem: Will the authors consider Indian Nationalism or anticolonialism a “predominant topic” of R’s writing? What about legislation and policy? “To judge by bibliographic references in the citing publications included in the study population, thje most often cited articles and books of R. fell into the domain of classification.” Further, “Garfield (1984, 46) found that Prolegomena to Library Classification was R’s most frequently cited publication.”
The authors found Colon Classification to be the most-cited book (23 citations, 18.9%), followed by Prolegonmena to Library Classification (21, 17.2%), and The Five Laws (12, 9.8%). 1992 was wild – in the modern quantitative context these are rookie numbers! Although I am employed to gather such statistics, I personally feel quantiative analysis is often a fool’s errand – but for context, today we see __ TK TK
The authors found that typically when a paper cited a work by R., most often there were references to multiple R. works. Classification-focused works represented “59% (72 out of 122) of the total number of citaitons.” As for the focus of the R. works cited therein, “Classification” was the main pluarality, which combined with “Cataloguing” received the majority of citations, at 45.8% and 11.3%, respectively. Though it’s not specified, my hunch is that The Five Laws was sorted into “Philosophy of librarainship,” which received 13.7% of the citations. “These data indicate that the domain of R.’s work receiving the bulk of the attention in English-language publications by American and Canadian librarians has been classification.”
The authors divided the citing works in overtly evaluative (73), implicitly evaluative (18) and non-evaluative (29). On a scale from “Very Favourable” to “Very Unfavorable”, the largest group of evaluative articles were “Favourable” at 30.4%, followed by “Very Favourable” and “Balanced,” at 18.6% and 14.7%, respectively. Only two evaluative articles were “Very Unfavourable.” Excluding reviews, nonevaluative articles accounted for 43.9%.
The mere fact that R’s publications were cited in fifty-seven articles published over twenty years and forty-five book reviews appearing over more than fifty years attests, in large measure, to his influence on American and Canadian library science.
The authors get a little hung up on what exactly is meant by the word “impact,” but suggest an interesting route would be comparing these findings against a similar process with “Dewey or Bliss.” Their discussion of the study’s limitations is noted and appreciated, but “despite these reservations,” the authors come away with two primary conclusions:
First, the category of R.’s publications that American and Canadian authors cited most frequently was classification… Second, a predominant number of the judgemental citing articles and book reviews affirmed and reccomended the work of R.
Therefore, there is “no doubt R. influenced library science in United States and Canada.”
TK TK note: cited Garfield article 1984: “A Tribute to S. R. Ranganathan, the Father of Indian Library Science. Part 2. Contributions to Indian and Internaiontal Library Science” Current Contents 7 (Feb. 13)
“I was serving out profession just as a beginner and was hopelessly frightened.”
Sharify is an Iranian writer/dramatist/poet who eventually meandered into the Library world and ended up teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. In the summer of 1964, R. lived with Sharify for three weeks while teaching two courses at the Univeristy. Sharify was well-versed in R.’s work, but prior to this the two had never met.
This piece is flowy and romantic, but IMO the style slightly outwore its welcome; Perhaps more problematically from a research standpoint, Sharify’s hero-worship puts Kuala’s to shame: This is a purely hagiographic portrait. We get lines like “R. looked slim and elegant. The broad expanse of his forehead and the penetrating rays of his eyes instatntly announced power, energy, pride, and dignignity” and “I saw with my own eyes that there was a child in the heart of this genius.”
Nonetheless, there’s some didatic exchanges, I’ll call out this one because it supports my dislike of writing standards like APA:
Languages … is [sic] a living thing. It changes its heart and its skin day by day. They are to mirror man’s ideas. When certain ideas cannot be expressed with existing words, new words wil replace the old ones. To express my thoughts unambigously and with clarity … I had to construct new words.
One interesting aspect of this piece is that, to my eyes, it appears as though R., toward the end of his life, had begun to embrace the aura of myth arround him; e.g. “he began to produly talk about how he established the Madras Library Association” – Earlier in life, he had been quite careful to acknowledge the significant (and frankly, preponderant) efforts of MALA’s co-founders. Sharify states “I knew quite well that he conducted a one-man library movement in a country as vast as India”; I’m absolutely comfortable stating R. did more than anyone else in this regard, but it’s interesting that Sharify here seems to prefer this mythic language.
One last bit I liked from this piece: Sharify asks R. how it was possible that he wrote on all these different aspects of the library world: Administration, classificaiton, reference, etc. R. responds “Son, … you may not realise the year I wrote a book on reference I was not able to write anything else.”
It is often the case with sci-tech celebrities that the general public recognise their name and face without knowing much of their contributions that made them famous.
Judinging from statements like “When R. entered the field of librarinship, library science hardly existed. Then, why he would want to get involved in librarinaship. [sic]” which are thoroughly addressed in his memoirs. The author here was also on the University of Pittsburgh faculty.
People who are innovative, unconvential, and original thinkers, are also often uncompromising, impatient, arrogant and even self-promoting. Dr. R.N. Sharma, in his dissertation … has quoted many library practitioners who did not like R. for his personality flaws, and it appears from his citation that R. had almost all the personality problems mentioned above.
Dr. S.R. R. was one of a few Indian librarians who is well known in the West due to his various contributions who have made a deep and a lasting impact on the international librarinship.
His most important contribution was introduction of the Five Laws of Library Science in 1928 but published in 1931 in a book form which are still guiding many libraries all over the world especially in the western world. [sic]
From 1948 to 1972, R. was in command of the global development of library and information science. … He attended the first UNESCO Conference on Public Librarinaship held in Manchester, England, during the summer of 1948 and played a prominent role in the Conference. This was the first time that many Western librarians who had read and heard about R. met or saw him in person.
R. was appointed a member of the International Committee of Library Experts of the United Nations in 1948. “He played a very important part to establish the policy of the United Naitons Library in New York… otherwise it would probably have been much more an American than an international library.”
In many ways, R. was ahead of his times. During his trips to the Western nations in the 1950’s, he predicted that in the near future, computers will replace the card catalogues in all types of libraries and will play an effective role in libraries. … In fact, R.’s “theories, and numerous writings mentally and academically prepared the library world to study and entertain information sicnec [and] made provision for receiving, welcomeing, and exploiting the computer.”
The fourth law, “Save the time of the reader” has become a permanent part of libraries… With the introduction of technology in libraries, the online catalog, CD-ROM technology, and online full text searching has fulfilled the dream of R.’s fourth law.
“In my view, the Five Laws have made a deep impact on the Western librarianship.”
”[CCS]… became very popular in India but not in the West. It is used only in a few libraries of Commonwealth Countries and the [UK].”
including many trips to the West (1958-1959, 1964)
R. is well known for introduction many new words to the field of [LIS]. Many of his words have become an important part of Western professionals and the professions … For technical services librarains, espectially indexters, some of his words like “facet”, “phase”, “isolate”, “focus” and many other words are like the Bible.
R. had an interest in the American as well as British librarianship. Therefore, he kept contacts with many librarians and library educators in the West world. [sic]
In the words of Michael Gorman, R. “is the unquestioned giant of 20th century library science.”