This installment covers the edited volume S.R. Ranganathan and the West (Sharma, 1992) and Esperanza’s (1994) Perspective on the Library movement in India, part of the cohort of material around R.’s 1992 centennial. (Which also includes R.’s A Librarian Looks Back, and to a certain extent Y.’s.)
R. and the West contains 15 articles from mostly-Western authors and proved invaluable for describing the academic lay-of-the-land just prior to renewed interest in The Five Laws. Perspective, as it turns out, is actually more about R.’s “disciple” P.N. Kaula (see A Librarian Looks Back), but included some excellent information about the state of Indian libraries before R.
This volume’s editor was the “Directory of Libraries, University of Evansville,” whose doctoral thesis concerned R.’s involvement in the development of the Indian library system. The collection includes fifteen papers and an appendix, contributed by both Western and Southeast Asian authors (or in the case of Pauline (Atherton) Cochrane, a Western expat living in Sri Lanka).
For as much trouble as I’ve had tracking down material for this project, it’s apparent that access in 1992 was even more difficult. The reference lists from Western authors reveal that only Eugine Garfield worked from the Herald articles eventually compiled into A Librarian Looks Back.
This leads to an increased reliance on second-hand accounts, which given the nature of R.’s personal style and work, tend toward overexaggeration and overattribution. (This volume contains one extreme example by Nasser Sharify, see below.)
As R. scholarship progresses, this creates ambiguity from Western authors (citing other Western authors) about basic ground-truth facts. Compounding this problem, editors (for whatever reason – expediency, I suppose?) don’t bother to correct. I’ve encountered this subtle-but-pernicious problem throughout this project, requiring me to assess which of two conflicting sources has greater support, or failing that, feels the most accurate.
Take, for example, the complexities of historical Indian geography: E.g., R.’s hometown was (at the time) known under multiple names, and its state was retitled after Independence. This creates a tendency for time-strapped Western Librarian authors to repeat whichever place names they encounter first, without cross-referencing the literature from the (literally & figuratively) foreign domain of 19th–20th c. Indian history.
This lack of general context contributes to a slow quality degradation in the Western R. literature, which IMO also arises from a false security with 20th c. English-language sources from India. That is, being able to read the prima face document lulls one into complacency; leading to missed cues regarding both the meaning and the intention of using specific colonial-era terms, or seeing between-the-lines material which a contemporaneous reader (or an academic with a better grasp on the context) would pick up. The effect of this is even harder to assess, and really requires Librarians to reach outside their discipline to appropriately address.
The overattribution problem is harder to get a handle on. Because of R.’s immense contributions to the library world, at times clarifying what he did and didn’t do feels like splitting hairs.
For example, R. did not create faceted classification (that’s Dewey); but he did introduce the terms “facet” and “facet analysis” to describe the technique (Sharma 1992); And did create the first fully-faceted system (CCS) and wrote the first deep exploration of the topic (Prolegomena). To sum up: R. was the first scholar to go hard on facet analysis from both a theoretical and practical perspective… but if you’re an author trying to hit a word count, does it matter if you gloss this distinction? Do you want to fight your editor if they want to? Is it worth perishing if standing your ground will prevent you from publishing?
This – along with the shorthand that “he founded” MALA without (at least) mentioning the two counterparts to which R. gives most of the credit: Ayyanki Venkataramanaiah and K.V. Krishnaswamy Ayyar (R., 1992) – is the most frequently-encountered example; But because R. contributed so much to the library world, these subtle glossings occur all over the place. This gives a casual reader the impression that R. was single-handedly responsible for (1) inventing concepts of which he was primarily an elaborator, or (2) creating organizations which were actually group efforts.
In this volume:
In the US, DDC and LCC enjoyed what businesspeople call the First Mover Advantage, and by Colon Classification’s [CCS] publication in 1933, were already firmly established in academic and professional settings. “The people who ran the libraries… were unlikely to pay attention to anyone proposition the adoption of another classification.” (Comaromi, 1992)
But the UK’s library system was established later; And arguably didn’t become truly accessible until the Carnegie foundation’s efforts (the number of UK libraries tripled between 1890 and 1910) and the 1919 Library Act. (R. 1931, p.212; see Context: UK) Europe also saw the parallel development of the “Documentation” field, which failed to become widely established in the US, and includes its own theoretical and practical classification-related literature.
Similarly, formal library education began earlier in the US; And in the early 20th c. in the UK, library education was just beginning to become established in formal college settings (like UCL). Hence, R.’s landmark technical works, CCS and the Prolegomena, were hanlded by US and UK pedagogy along rather different lines. I believe† this difference largely accounts for the narrow US scholarly emphasis on The Five Laws exclusively as a first-principles work.
In Europe, a larger number of classification schemes were being actively used and developed: DDC and LCC shared space with Bibliographic Classification, Documentation-related classification, and others. Hence, UK library pedagogy more readily absorbed CCS into its curricula, in both theoretical and practical spheres. (e.g., For discussion of facet analysis and comparison between different systems; but also as an option a new library may want to use.)
The UK also had the benefit of Bernard Ira Palmer, who appears as a minor character in R.’s and Y.’s memoirs. Palmer was a UK librarian who served in the Royal Armoured Corps (e.g. tanks) during WWII, and was luckily stationed near Madras. A huge fan of R.’s Prolegomena, Palmer frequented the U. Madras library and became fast friends with R. As Harrison (1992) clarifies, after the war, Palmer became the Education Officer of [LAUK], overseeing
an ad hoc committee of library educators, examiners and practising librarians whose remit was to revise 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.
Later, Palmer and A. J. Wells’ published Fundamentals of Library Classification (1951), which “immediately became recommended reading for students,” and Harrison describes as “a restatement of the CCS principles which focuses them on classification by DDC.”
But in the US, DDC and LCC’s pre-xisting establishment relegated CCS to the theoretical sphere only. As Comaromi (1992) states, “a few [US] library schools examined his ideas in classification courses. What was learned did not survive graduation.” Further,
R.’s thought, particularly his Five Laws of Library Science, was discussed by [US] library scholars during the middle third of the century–usually favourably. The discussions, however, did not engender much action. … The dialogue between [R. and Henry E. Bliss] was touched upon by Susan Bury in her comparison of [CCS and Bibliographic Classification]. But as neither classification was used in the United States, the… thoughts of both men fell upon infertile sole. (ibid)
Adding some quantitative data to this, Garfield (1992) quotes a study (Thomas 1977) that found
of 48 [ALA-accredited] schools, 73 per cent (35 school) include facet theory in their curricula. But of these, only 20 per cent (seven schools) cover in any depth [sic]. And although 50 per cent of schools include [CCS]… only about eight per cent (two schools) conduct any practice exercises in it.
Further, as Fink & Haung (1992) found, CCS and Prolegomena were R.’s most-cited-or-reviewed works in the US and Canadian LIS literature, comprising 18.9% and 17.2% of the 122 citations (respectively), with The Five Laws in third at 9.8%. This throws some unknowns into the mix – Did 20th c. Canadian LIS pedagogy skew more toward US or UK frameworks? – but suggests† that North American LIS scholars primarily associated R. with classification, and thus (from a pedagogic perspective) the theoretical sphere.1
In this volume, we find Cochrane (1992) first encountered R.’s work “in a course on the History and Theory of Cataloguing at the University of Chicago; [emphasis mine]” While Finks (1992) encountered “the ‘Five Laws’ in the introductory survey course and [CCS] in the advanced cataloguing course.” As LIS educators, Cochrane has “written [the Five Laws] on every blackboard in every classroom where I have taught;” and Finks regularly uses “the ‘Five Laws’ as a basis for my efforts to teach the philosophical foundations of the work we do. [emphasis mine].”
Already in 1992, we find an academic pushing back against the reductive framing of R.’s work in the western literature: Humphrey notes that “so much had been written about” the “fascinating” and “esoteric” aspects of R.’s first-principles work in the Five Laws “that I believed his fundamental influence on librarinship in his own country may have been neglected.” Or as Gauri (1992) comments, “Despite his towering and voluminous contribution, he remains somewhat obscure to the American librarianship and studied with an element of curiosity in library schools.”
It is my opinion† that this initial-and-continued placement of R.’s work into the theoretical sphere in US LIS pedagogy has conditioned students (and hence, future scholars) to overlook the vast practical implications of The Five Laws’ engagement with political advocacy and experimental literary techniques.
† You may notice my unusual reliance on waffly diction in this section: The footwork to demonstrate this skewing of R.’s work toward the theoretical sphere in the US is frankly beyond my timeframe here… But if any enterprising MLIS students are looking for a thesis topic, a longitudinal analysis and comparison of US and UK syllabi (ideally both quantitative and qualitative) will likely reveal fascinating insights.
The works in this volume clarify that the Western lack of interest in R.’s political context is not a recent phenomenon. Stiles (1992) provides this typical western perspective on R.’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 absent from this list’s called-out activities are his involvement with the nationalist movement or policy/legislation work. Comaroni’s (1992) (otherwise excellent) analysis of the lax American scholarly interest in R.’s work contains no significant discussion of politics. Garfield’s (1992) (otherwise excellent) biography includes no mention of the British colonial system, and R.’s political contributions are explicitly mentioned 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-independence] he published an influential work detailing plans for a system of national, state, university, public, and school libraries for the entire country… [which] was brought forward at the request of Indian government 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 government, they came to him for advise on developing the nation’s library system.
Note that this characterizes R. as more of a passive participant in the nationalist movement, whereas he characterized much of his pre-Independence work as (broadly) educationalist, and pro-democratic in service of the Nationalist movement. (Side note: This is the first time I’ve read that R. brought nationalists books while they were incarcerated; I’m unsure where Garfield is sourcing this, and am disinclined to believe it without further verification – it feels to mythological.)
(See here for full notes)
This article focuses on how R.’s writing style mimics features of Hindu scripture, particularly in the style of sutras and one of the “six Hindu school of philosophy,” Mimamsa, which is concerned with systematizing aspects of ritual.
Aside from R.’s “profuse use of parables and illustrations from the Hindu religious texts” and “frequent use of Sanskrit metaphysical concepts like ‘Ekavakyata’,”
It is not difficult to find a parallel 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 invariably 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.’” Moreover, “The use of sutra as ritual… is even more profound in the school of Mimamsa philosophy,” where in some cases “The mere unquestioned recitation and performance of the ritual 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 CCS, “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.”
A lesser thread of this article concerns R.’s habit of subdividing his works into sequential sections to an extreme, which Gauri suggests is a carryover from his time as a mathematician and experience with logical proofs.
Sans-references and “more anecdotal than it ought to be,” Stiles reflects on the profound effect of encountering CCS in the late 1940s, including his subsequent use of and work on the system in the 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.”
The thrust of this paper is dovetailing the author’s personal story with the development of his ideas about classification, and critiquing the increasingly domain-specific classification strategies developing in the then-new field of Information Science. I had general quibbles with his Stiles’ argument here, but the following really raised my hackles:
Librarians as librarians seem in disarray these days, retreating before the huge advances in information technology. Is it possible that librarians will relinquish their grasp on classification, their lifeline? [emphasis mine] … Librarian, classify thyself. Order must prevail notwithstanding the formidable achievements of electronic automation. Order means general order, that is recourse to general classification.
I feel the exploding world of material to classify is better served by federated, rather than general, classification – but more importantly, I’d argue that for a great many librarians, classification is not only not “their lifeline,” but it’s frankly not important at all.2
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 – A study of “Walace Steven’s fixation with the Kantian noema” – allows him to extract the necessary ideas to finally make an academic theory cohere. 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 fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and our origins In ghastlier demarcations, keener sounds.
This not-great paper covers R.’s studies at UCL, and the later impacts of his classification work on then-current library pedagogy. McIlwaine doesn’t reference A Librarian Looks Back, and R. covers his own UCL studies with significantly more detail. Puzzlingly, McIlwaine states
Questions such as “the Electors in a Rural Parish desire to have the Public Library Libraries Act adopted for their parish. What steps must be taken to accomplish this and why?” or “Summarize the import important conclusions of the report of the Carnegie United Kingdom 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 exact material and how successful he applied this knowledge in The Five Laws in his prolific advocacy work.
Regarding Facet analysis, McIlwaine describes R.’s strength as digging into this preexisting 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 instinctive approach of his predecessors.
Or to frame this a little differently, pushing Library Science further away from “art” and into “science.” This is a topic I hope to cover in this study, but again, I just feel I’m running out of time.
This paper is hugely valuable for this study; I’ve already quoted several relevant portions in the “key takeaways” section above. I’m going to be lazy and reprint my notes in full:
According to Camaromi, (1992) “R.’s thought, particularly his Five Laws of Library Science, was discussed by library scholars 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 (1992) observes that discussions of R.’s work and thought were hampered by the US’ established use of DDC and LCC. That is, in Britain and other parts of the world, robust comparative discussions about different classification systems necessarily 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 whose “professional thinking” is “guided by” the Five Laws of Library Science.
Comaromi contrasts the development of LCC and DDC; with the former developing along hermetic ideological lines, and their later more freely incorporating ideas from other classification 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 peccadilloes 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.
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 Victorian 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 subcontinent, but more important from the communications angle, the spread of schools and colleges was greatly extending knowledge of the English language.
This article details the Palmer material included in the “Key Takeaways” above. Much of the article is 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. This material is useful but a little beyond the scope of my study.
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 majority of this piece is beyond the temporal scope of my project, but the framing is relevant and relayed in “Key Takeaways” above.
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.
Introduced first to CCS and then The Five Laws, the Laws’ succinctness and depth 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 statements have served as my guiding star throughout my professional career.” The elided center of this quote is a list of activities: cataloguing, management, reference service, 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 exercise 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 discharged, 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 (1970) termed “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 barrier, rather than a facilitator, for information seekers.
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,” “proper growth”, or the nature of a librarian’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 proper growth is not in quantity or quality, but sensorium, 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, encouraging present-day students to review his Five Laws and other writings.
This article concern’s R’s style as an educator. It begins with a description of R.’s, during 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.”
R. insisted that rote teaching was unhelpful and emphasized adaptability instead, “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.”
Several quotes from this article regarding LIS pedagogy are featured in “Key Takeaways.”
One fun item in this article is a mention of a 1975 FLFX paper: R.’s Five Laws of Library Science: American Revised Version (Wilson Library Bulletin, 49, April 1975) This was apparently a tongue-in-cheek affair, but “Despite its humor, the impact of the Five Laws in the western library world becomes very clear:”
Garfield is, of course, the storied founder of ISI; an Oppenheimer-like figure whose informetrics work has since been twisted by academic administrators into the very misuses he warned against. The biographical portions of this article are drawn mostly from R.’s Herald memoirs. Garfield was a big fan of R. – he requested a portrait of R. in ISI’s “Cathedral of Man” mural – and wrote a few relatively well-cited articles about him (in Current Contents) during the 80s. Garfield provides some good context for modern-day readers:
R. himself considered [The Five Laws] to be 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 librarians 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 nineteenth century.
Some helpful stats for later:
Although R.’s works on classification and cataloguing are his best recognised contributions, 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 such issues as library administration, education of librarians, and library legislation.
An interesting terminology thing: Rather than the terms “precordinate” and “postcordinate,” Garfield uses “enumerative” and “analytico-synthetic” classification.
This is a quantitative article, so naturally I’ll be doing a bit more nitpicking here. The second author is Finks’ research assistant. Methodology includes “citation and content analysis”; They cite the excellent MacRoberts & MacRoberts, married biologists holding a lone torch in the wild for qualitative analysis in impacts (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 gauge 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. [emphasis 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 Prolegomena 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!
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 citations.” As for the focus of the R. works cited therein, “Classification” was the main plurality, 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 librarianship,” 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 recommended the work of R.
Therefore, they conclude, there is “no doubt R. influenced library science in United States and Canada.”
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 University. 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 instantly announced power, energy, pride, and dignity” and “I saw with my own eyes that there was a child in the heart of this genius.”
Nonetheless, there’s some didactic 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 will replace the old ones. To express my thoughts unambiguously 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 around him; e.g. “he began to proudly 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, classification, 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.
This is an interesting thought when applied to R. In my own experience with my librarian coworkers, they knew R. had invented CCS, and had encountered The Five Laws in college (though none had actually read the book). I don’t have stats to back this up, I’d venture to guess that outside of LIS and Indian history, very few Americans in the “general public” have ever heard of R.
Judging from statements like “When R. entered the field of librarianship, library science hardly existed. Then, why he would want to get involved in librarianship. [sic]” which are thoroughly addressed in his memoirs. The author here was also on the University of Pittsburgh faculty. Frankly I’m a little neither-here-nor-there on this article, but we do finally encounter some non-hagiographic material:
People who are innovative, unconventional, 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.
An overall excellent and balanced biography! Much of this focuses on R.’s later career (hence, out of my scope), but it includes several helpful and lucid quotes. (See full notes if desired.)
This book was written for P. N. Kaula’s 70th birthday. (Recall that R.’s “A Librarian Looks Back” originated as a series of articles in Kaula’s Herald of Library Science, and Kaula later edited the revised book form reviewed earlier in this study.) Esperanza describes Kaula as R.’s “disciple”, having studded and work with him for “about twenty-five years.” According to Esperanza, if R. is the “Father of Library Science,” Kaula is the “Father of the Library Movement;” having taken R.’s passion for librarianship and singleminded work ethic into the organization and development of India’s public library network. She describes Kaula as the country’s foremost living expert on Colon Classification System [CCS], and he was apparently instrumental in getting many Indian libraries to adopt it.
This section includes a valuable (if poorly-organized) walk-through of India’s history with public libraries.
We find the earliest Indian libraries, like their UK counterparts, attached to religious institutions (temples, monastaries) and the homes or associations of the wealthy and powerful. Also like their UK counterparts, these early libraries were typically preservation-focused and access was tightly controlled. “During the Medieval Period,” – which, interestingly, rather than R. and Y.’s depiction of a state of cultural decay under the “Muslim Invaders,” Esperanza categorizes as “the golden period of Indian History” – A librarian “was held in high esteem and was honoured with white robes of Royalty.” (5)
There’s a fascinating note about a perhaps under-discussed aspect of colonial extraction: In 1789, during the Company Raj, the India Office Library was established in London, as a storehouse for material taken from India, and “has since grown as the ‘Largest Specialist Oriental Library’ in existence.” (2)
Back on the subcontinent, the State of Bombay formally registered its libraries in 1808. “In 1835, The first Public Library was started at Calcutta from private resources, and by 1841 it had collected about 20,000 publications in its holdings.” (2) In 1850, subscription-funded Public Libraries “were established at Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras mostly for the benefit of the British residents”; and “By the end of the 19th century we have had many ‘Free’ libraries established in big cities.”
These “public” libraries were to date still privately-run, but the first Public-qua-Public Library was “started in 1886 by a school teacher in Visakhapatnam and was called Saraswati Granthalayam.” (3) Public libraries were founded in Ongole (1890), Vizianagaram (1894), and Undi and Kumudavalli of the West Godawari District (1895 and 1899). In 1900, the “Calcutta Public Library was taken over by the Government of India and a reading room was opened”; This eventually became the Imperial Library, rechristened the National Library after India’s independence in 1948.
But according to Esperanza, first-and-foremost “The Public Library Movement today is a product of our cultural renaissance and the revival of our love for our culture and tradition. The Indian Library Movement was conceived with the nationalists spirit was surging forth with great enthusiasm;” (3) And “With this new spirit of national consciousness, there was improvement of the vernacular press.” (4) Again like their UK counterparts, Indian libraries’ role “in adult education and adult literacy work is of outstanding importance.” (4)
She identifies the Maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekwad, the ruler of the “Princely State of Baroda” as a key figure in kickstarting the modern phase of India’s library movement. Impressed with western library systems during his travels abroad, he “engaged the services of W. A. Borden, an American Librarian for opening and organizing the Central Library and the other libraries in the State.” (6) During his three years in India, Borden also published the country’s first Library periodical from his Central Library post, Library Miscellany, printed bilingually in English and Gujarai.
Inspried, “the people in Andhra […] welcomed this ray of brilliance in 1914,” establishing the Andhra Desa Library Association, and opening several libraries “in the villages, towns and cities of Andhra Desa.” Largely thanks to the “untiring efforts of Iyyanki Venkata Ramanayya, the First Great Pioneer of the Library Movement in India.” (6) The Andhra Dessa Library Association “started it first conference in 1919 at Madras,” with the editor of The Hindu, “S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar as its first Chairman.” The Andhra Library Association members formed the “nucleus” of the “All India Public Library Association” [AIPLA] formed in 1924. Ranganathan’s eventual involvement with the AIPLA in 1927 led directly to the creation of the Madras Library Association [MALA] the following year; being the fourth such association spun directly from the IAPLA connections.
“In 1907, [I.V.R.], a young lad of nineteen years and while still in school, entered public life. He gave up his studies and joined the Freedom Movement.” (8) He toured around the country, speaking and trying to get people to create libraries. In 1911 he was “made the First Secretary of the Ram Mohan Free Library at Vijayawada,” and founded the Andhra Desa Library Association of Indian Public Library Movement in 1914. In 1915, he began publishing the journal Granthalaya Sarwaswamu (in “Indian language”) and in 1924 the Indian Library Journal (in English).
Iyyanki was involved in establishing:
“As Secretary of the [AIPLA], Iyyanki organized conference both at the national level and the state level.” He had a particular interest in rural library service, and “designed a scheme of classification for the village libraries.” Iyyanki set the “preliminary groundwork” for experiments with library legislation that R. would later bring to fruition, beginning with the First Model Library Bill in 1931.
Note! “LT” degree stands for “License of Teaching”
With the rich experience of visiting several libraries abroad and also working in a few of them, Ranganathan felt that each library in India was developing in its own independent direction rather than developing according to common principles. While he was in London, he was impressed by the community orientation of the foreign libraries. Unlike the library in India, the British libraries made every effort to serve all strata of society equally. hence, R. got himself busy with the task of defining some unifying principles to develop Indian libraries and make them serviceable to our people. (11)
“The Laws, although self-evident in the functions of modern libraries, strongly confirm that libraries are Service-oriented.” (12) “Iyyanki and Dr. Ranganathan worked together in the Library Profession for twenty years and there grew an understanding and friendship between them.” (12)
R. took great interest in this youth [Kaula] who was full of life and full of zeal for the Profession. R., placing all his hopes in this youth, it was almost as though, R. handed over the baton to Kaula to continue the work begun by him.
The Library development is based very much on the modern development of Science and Technology. Library development can be brought about only by enacting Library Legislation in the country. It is only through Library Legislation that provisions can be made for technical assistance to deal with library and information activities.
I take issue with the repeated use of the word “only” in the above sentiment.
“The Library Profession is a service-oriented profession. It posses the art of rendering service in a spirit of dedication in order to help humanity.”
“It is sad to note that India which was under the British Rule for 185 years and when she got her Indepdendence on August 15, 1947, there was not a single Public Library in the country.” (Doesn’t her earlier history contradict this? She means by legislation, I suppose?) Note that, although Britain’s education bills were implemented in India, the 1850 Library Act was not.
“No work can be done properly unless it is done systematically and with necessary background and training. The library profession is not an exception to this. Library training and development of Library Services go together.” I might also push back on this a little, particularly regarding the “systematically”.
Borden (mentioned above) started the first library classing in 1911. “In 1915, another American Librarian Asa Don Dickinson who had been invited to organize the Punjab University Library, Lahore (Pakistan), started a part time Library course at the University Library.” Both Borden and Dickinson were students of Dewey. These two courses “resulted in the introduction of Dewey Decimal Classification and the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules and other American practices.” R. was next, with his MALA course, which was formally taken over by U. Madras in 1931 and “converted into a full-time Post-graduate Diploma Course in 1937.” (18)
Andhra University provided a short-lived library training program in 1935. Library courses and school were later opened in Andhra University (1935, short-lived), Benaras Hindu Universtiy (1941), Bombay (1943), Calcutta (1946), and Delhi (1947). See Esperanza (1994) Appendix 1 for a full list.
A number of Library Schools were established in India after Independence. Today we have library schools in almost all the States. (18)
“R. possessed many good as well as provoking qualities in him. He had a kind and loving heart for hard working persons but also a hasty tongue. He had a far-seeing intellect but also a suspicious min. He was sociable at times but also selfish in all the good he did. Intellectually liberal but materially unwilling to give.” (39)
R. was a giant with a great intellect but even so, he fell out with almost everyone in every place. Even today in his death, we find that he has many enemies and also many friends who keep his name and work alive in the field of Library Science. (40)
“Kaula has been a great imbiber of the spirit of Ranganathan. It is he alone among many others who has assumed the first position of being a faithful follower of his Guru.” (41)
“Kaula himself testifies that R. was at times a short-tempered person and a hard task-master. It was impossible then to live with him at any moment. Also he says, there were times when R. showed such a lack of concern, sympathy and kindness to those who spent their energies for him, with the result that he has not been able to get full cooperation from his fellow workers in his work.” (41)
Ironically, as Camaroni (1992) states, DDC began incorporating more faceting features beginning with the 17th ed. in 1965, and formally introducing the term “faceting” with the 19th in 1979. Hence, we arrive at the present day where facet analysis is once again deeply practical to US librarianship, but can be framed under the auspices of DDC rather than CCS for maximum practicality.
This is a whole other can of worms… but philosophically, I feel he’s missing what I consider the fundamental experience of librarianship, which has essentially nothing to do with “order.” Let’s take a step back and consider what “classification” is designed to prioritize within the exchange between the librarian, the patron, and the library itself. Conceptually, a clear, systematized 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 the experience of being in an open-ended space of inquiry; the variegated smells, paper textures, and bindings of books; the pleasantness of the library; an unexpectedly long set of interesting links on a an interesting-looking website; (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 may have absolutely nothing to do with ordering information whatsoever.