Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan

(1892-1972)

pronounced RAHN ga NAH then

One of the most progressive information scientists of the twentieth century, and the man believed to have coined the phrase "library science," was born of middle-class, educated parents in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. S. R. Ranganathan earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in mathematics at a local college in order to realize his ambition to teach. While a young professor of mathematics at the University of Madras, he was chosen from 900 applicants for a new position as University Librarian. Neither he nor any of the other applicants were formally trained as librarians. Ranganathan reluctantly took the position and was soon sent to London to earn a graduate degree in library science at University College. His grades were only a bit above average, but he immersed himself in the problems of decimal classification and began to formulate a new system of classification that would become known as Colon Classification for the colons used to separate the fields.1

Ranganathan's biographers claim that when he returned to India to take up the position of librarian, he dedicated the rest of his life to all aspects of his new profession, working long days with no time off for the next 20 years and writing and promoting the cause of libraries in India during his spare time. Over the next few years Ranganathan, ever the rationalist and a disciple of the scientific method, contributed his deceptively simple and yet incredibly profound "Five Laws of Library Science":

  1. Books are for use.
  2. Every reader his or her book.
  3. Every book its reader.
  4. Save the time of the reader.
  5. The Library is a growing organism.2

The values and philosophy articulated by Ranganathan in these few words serve as the bedrock foundations of library and information sciences as taught and practiced today. The fifth law, declaring the changing nature of libraries over time, may be more evident than when Ranaganathan first formulated these precepts around 1930. Many of his observations about libraries and library science indicate that Ranganathan may have been a man ahead of his own time.

Another of Ranganathan's many contributions to the discipline of modern information science is his method of faceted classification. Also known as the analytico-synthetic method, Ranganathan's system of classifying library materials, although never widely used in traditional libraries, has greatly influenced classification theory. Colon Classification is based on the idea that traditional systems such as the Dewey Classification System and the Library of Congress Classification System set up categories into which individual objects must be fitted. Ranganathan's system starts with the individual object itself and arranges the categories around the salient aspects (facets) of that object. According to classification researchers, this method is a more flexible and precise means of classification. The different facets of an object, according to Ranganathan, are

  • Personality--the primary facet and what the object (any concept that can be described) is about.
  • Matter--what the object consists of.
  • Energy--action or being related to the object.
  • Space--where the object is or takes place.
  • Time--when the object is or takes place.
Although Ranganathan's Colon Classification is difficult to master and tends to produce class descriptions too lengthy to fit on book spines, its basic methodology of facet analysis seems prophetically suited to the explosion of information objects that has accompanied the growth of the Internet.3 Some have suggested that classification by facets is similar to how objects are being organized and retrieved on the Internet and the World Wide Web--an archetype for providing data about data.4

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NOTES:

  1. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, "S. R. Ranganathan." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._R._Ranganathan (Accessed 21 November, 2004)
  2. S. R. Ranganathan, The Five Laws of Library Science. Bombay and New York: Asia Publishing House, 1963.
  3. Aimee Glassel, "Was Ranganathan a Yahoo!?" End User's Corner, March 1998. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/toolkit/enduser/archive/1998/euc-9803.html (Accessed 21 November, 2004).
  4. David Ellis and Ana Vasconcelos, "Ranganathan and the Net: Using Facet Analysis to Search and Organise the World Wide Web," Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives, 51, no. 1 (1999).

This page developed as part of the Dead Germans Project
and as an assignment for The University of Tennessee, School of Information Sciences,
SIS 490, Information Environment, Dr. Gretchen Whitney
Created November 22, 2004, by Nancy Burdette Thomas