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Vol. XXV No. 19, January 16-31, 2016

The Father of ­Library Science

(Continued from last fortnight)

Chandra Sri Ram, a grand-niece of S.R. Ranganathan, the legendary librarian, ­recalls him after a visit to Sirkazhi, where he was born and did his early education.

The departure itself, to leave for London in September 1924, was not an easy one. He consulted his mother, paternal grandmother and his former headmaster from his school in Sirkazhi, who was then the Headmaster of the Hindu High School in Triplicane.

His paternal grandmother quoted from the classics and told him that in quest of knowledge it was all right for him to cross the oceans. His mother, on the other hand, stunted by early widowhood, was not happy. All that his former headmaster could do was to give him a copy of the Valmiki Ramayana in Sanskrit and advise him to read it regularly and that it would help. Ranganathan started reading his Ramayana that same day, November 14, 1923.

srr-londonSRR at the North-West Poytechnic London.

This particular volume of the Ramayana became an inseparable companion for the rest of Ranganathan’s life. He would read a passage from it every morning whether he was at home or on his travels, whether alone or with others. Every time he finished going through the book (some 534 pages), he would commence a new cycle from the start and read it all over again. In his own typical way, the date of every cycle started would be noted down on the title page. The last such noting was on June 10, 1949. For some reason he did not continue this notation except for one entry made on April 1, 1957.

* * *

Three years after his return from the UK, tragedy struck again. In 1928, his wife Rukmani died in a drowning accident in the temple tank of the Sri Parthasarathy Temple. Although they did not have any children, they were extremely close and some of the corres­pondence they exchanged when he was in London bears testimony to this. Ranganathan never fully recovered from this misfortune. To overcome his grief, he delved deeper into his subject, working relentlessly for some 13 hours a day, a habit that his students say he continued for the rest of his professional life.

In 1929, on the advice of his family and friends, he married Sarada and they lived a happy life together until the end of his life. They had one son, Yogeshwar Ranganathan, who is married and settled in Luxembourg. He is the author of several books, including a biography of his father titled SR Ranganathan: Pragmatic Philosopher of Information Science, A Personal Biography. The beginning of library science.

When Ranganathan was attending University College, London, it was one of the few, if not the only, institution in the world which had a course dedicated to what is now known as Library Science. On the voyage back from London, he began thinking more deeply about the library in the Connemara building which he had left behind. Rather than blaming its poor functioning solely on a lack of resources, he was convinced that the problem lay equally with the poor administrative systems. On the voyage he came up with a list of practical measures to ensure the better administration of the library. These included “Keep the library open daily from 7 am to 8 pm”, “Keep it open every day of the year, without exception”, “Provide intensive customer assistance”, and “Find or create the right physical ambience”. While he is known as one of the great masters of technical classification, his philosophy of classification had a most practical outlook.

Ranganathan’s list provides an important insight into the perspective which he later brought to the science of classification, a perspective which became his obsession: the goal of every library and system of classification must be the dissemination of information to as many people as quickly as possible, and in a manner easiest for the user. Put simply, access to information. This today seems to be an obvious fact. But as Ranganathan often observed, librarians in those days (and perhaps some even today) were more concerned with preserving books and hounding borrowers to return them than with ensuring easy access for all.
The list is also good evidence that, even at this early stage, Ranganathan was ahead of his time when it came to access to knowledge and information. One of the items on his list was “Provide a mail order facility for users out of station.”

Ranganathan’s work was vast and technical, so only a brief summary of his main work can be attempted here. The starting point is what is widely considered to be his masterpiece. In 1931 he wrote The Five Laws of Library Science. It was dedicated to his first wife, Rukmani. With his five laws, Ranganathan was, ironically, doing exactly what he thought systems of classification should do: build up from the bottom. The book is remarkable for showcasing not just Ranganathan’s brilliance of thought and clear expression, but a sense of humour which often leaves the reader both smiling and illuminated. The five laws were, as he described them, basic, perhaps even obvious, because they were fundamental to all library science. The five laws are as follows: 1. BOOKS ARE FOR USE and not for mere preservation. This law addresses, among others, the location, library hours, and the provision of sufficient library furniture and staff.

2. BOOKS ARE FOR ALL, i.e. every reader should be served his or her book. This widens the concept that books are for a chosen few. The second law speaks from the side of users. Ranganathan’s second law was no longer satisfied with offering women books on ‘Home Making’ or with the books of orthodox devotion but insists that all books have the perfect right to enter any home for the benefit of all the members of the home, irrespective of sex. Ranganathan goes on to show how access to information has been denied to the general public throughout human history. One of the many examples he gives is: Aristotle’s dictate “A slave can have no deliberative faculty”. The result: education was available only to free men which excluded nine-tenths of the population from the privilege of learning.

3. EVERY BOOK ITS READER, i.e. every book should be helped to find its reader. It appears on the outside to be the same as the First Law but there is a difference. ‘Books are for Use’ is a declaration of principle. ‘Every Book its Reader’ is a directive to make a book more useful.

4. SAVE THE TIME OF THE READER. This law is not so self-evident as the others. Nonetheless it has been responsible for many reforms in library administration and has great potentiality in the future. He presents his case with a time and motion study of a typical user of a library. He points out that in 1928 at the University Library in Madras the time spent by an average user at the counter where you could return books and pick up new ones was a half hour. With 200 users per day this amounted to 36500 man-hours per year lost in an unproductive occupation. To him this was a colossal waste of time. He decided to do something about it and he later did through a combination of his theories of classification and his dedication to effective library administration and architecture.
5. A LIBRARY IS A GROWING ORGANISM. A library could appear to be an inert physical entity consisting of documents stored and displayed in an appropriate habitat. But an organism by very definition is a living entity, constantly changing and adapting to new conditions. For Ranganathan, a library was a place of action. The activity pertained to acquisition, storage and dissemination of information, which was the basis for providing the means to spread knowledge. The Fifth Law contains all the ingredients to evolve and execute any management and planning effort.
Dr Ranganathan’s obsession with access to information, regardless of class or creed, is the obvious thread running through the five laws. For him, an unread book or, worse, a reader who cannot be connected with the knowledge which he desires, was an avoidable crime.

Following naturally from his five laws, Ranganathan’s next major work came out in 1933 with the invention of the Colon Classification system. Put briefly and crudely, this was the first major analytic-synthetic classification, or classification by which classes are built from different parts, from the bottom up. Its origins began in Ranganathan’s criticism of systems such as the Dewey Decimal System, which failed to recognise that classifications can have several different classifications. For example, a book on Indian Military History could with equal justification be classified under “India”, “History”, “Military”, “Indian History” or “Military History”. An effective classification, he argued, needed to recognise this difficulty and deal with it in such a way that permits a reader to find the topic or book that she is looking for as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Without going into the technical details of the classification system, which I am not qualified to do in any event (though it is worth some investigation if only to see Ranganathan’s interesting take on the scientific process and to discover what he means by “APUPA”), suffice to say the process of thinking he instigated, arguably changed fundamentally the way in which information science has operated. Some believe that his work on analytic-synthetic classification laid the very early groundwork for Google Search and other systems dependent upon a faceted classification of information.
* * *
Though he wrote some 60 books and some 2,000 articles and was a consultant on numerous library projects around India and the world, Ranganathan loved teaching. Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to be put in touch with an old student of his, Abdul Rahman. He related a story which illustrates Ranganathan’s teaching method and his broad approach towards classification.

Ranganathan would usually arrange his first class of the day to take place between 4.30am and 5am. A small group of students selected Ranganathan, including Rahman, would make their way to his home, by which time Ranganathan would have completed his morning ablutions and puja and had his breakfast. He would then take his class during his morning stroll. After finishing his walk, Ranganathan would return to his home and continue the lesson. The atmosphere was encouraging and supportive of creativity, but very rigorous. As might be expected in a class held by Ranganathan, there was little tolerance for disorderly expression.

One morning, Rahman was running late (he had to cycle some distance every day to make the morning class), and, so, arrived just as the group was heading off with Ranganathan for the walk. He quickly dismounted and joined the group, pushing his bicycle. This particular morning’s session was dedicated to the difficulty of classifying large amounts of complex information. Dr Ranganathan turned to him and said, “For example, name me all the parts of your bicycle.” Rahman started naming all the parts he could think of. The saddle. The bars. The chain. The tyres. The bell. The basket. At this point Ranganathan stopped him and asked him why he had picked that order, if indeed there was any order. Rahman could have ordered his answer in a number of ways: by function, size, or order of importance to the user. He could even have named the parts starting from the front of the bicycle to the back or the other way around!

By this simple example, Ranganathan had demonstrated at least three things. First, the importance of structure when presenting an idea. Second, he was addressing the very human instinct to display information in a random or disorderly way. Third, he was introducing what was perhaps the most important strand of his philosophy of Library Science: that any classification system must have a purpose beyond the mere presentation of information. If a library is for use, then the system one chooses of presenting information can make all the difference.

* * *

Ranganathan received numerous awards during his lifetime including the Padma Shri in 1957, an honour that many members of his profession thought was not high enough.

In November 1994, UNESCO brought out a Public Library Manifesto which reads somewhat like an afterglow of Ranganathan’s own more precise and more comprehensive Manifesto announced 66 years earlier in 1928, at the Annual Educational Conference of South India held in Chidam­baram.

As with many men utterly dedicated to their calling, the awards and recognition, though warmly welcomed, were mere side-effects of his life’s work, which was dedicated to finding a way to get as many books to as many readers as possible. He had no interest in fame. He did not chase publishers to keep his books in print (even the name of his greatest work is an indication that he had no interest in thinking up catchy titles that would market well). He did not attach his name to the system of classification he invented, preferring to call it the Colon Classification System after the colons which are used to separate the call numbers representing each class. He was, if there is such a concept, the opposite of a politician. He is, however, revered among those who work in his field.

(Concluded)

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