History of Dr S.R.
Ranganatan
(Father of Library and
Information Science Movement in India)
Dr. S. R. Ranganathan - a tribute on the Librarian's
Day
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, Father of Library and
Information Science movement in India, was born onAugust 12th 1892
to Ramamrita at Shiyali in The Tanjur district of Madras State, in
the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India (British-ruled India) Ramamrita Ayyar
died (on 13 January 1898) rather suddenly after a bout of illness at the age of
30, when Ranganathan was only six years old. Ranganathan's mother survived this
loss for nearly 55 years and died at Delhi due to a fire accident at the home in
January 1953. Ranganathan married when he was fifteen years old in 1907.
Rukmini was his wife's name. She was very devoted to Ranganathan and an able
house keeper. But she died in an accident on 13 November 1928 at the
Parthasarathy Koil Tank, Triplicane, Madras where she had gone for a bath. The
couple had no children. Ranganathan married again in December 1929 to Sarada;
she was also devoted to Ranganathan and helped him to work ceaselessly for the
cause of the library profession. She even persuaded him to donate large sums of
money for the Chair of Library Science in Madras University and to the
Endowment. She died at the age of 78 years on 30 July 1985 in Bangalore.
His most notable contributions to the field of
Library and Information Science, particularly his five laws of library science
and the development of the first major analytico-synthetic classification
system, the Colon Classification. He is considered to be the father of library
science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known
throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental thinking in the field. His
birthday is observed every year as the National Library Day in India. He was a
university librarian and professor of library science at Benares Hindu
University (1945–47) and professor of library science at the University of
Delhi (1947–55). The last appointment made him director of the first Indian
school of librarianship to offer higher degrees. He was president of the Indian
Library Association from 1944 to 1953. In 1957 he was elected as a honorary
member of the International Federation for Information and Documentation and
was made a vice president for life of the Library Association of Great Britain.
Early life and
education
Ranganathan's education was initiated on Vijayadasami day in October, 1897 withAksharabyasam at
Ubhayavedanthapuram near Shiyali. After this, Ranganathan was admitted to a
school in Shiyali, and was handed to the care of Subba Ayyar, a brother of his
maternal grandfather and a primary school teacher. During his school days,
Ranganathan came under the influence of two of his teachers who shaped his mind
-R. Antharama Ayyar and Thiruvenkatachariar, the Sanskrit teacher. From them
Ranganathan learnt about the life teachings of nayanars (Shaivaite Bhaktas) and
Alwars (Vaishnavaite Bhaktas). Depth of scholarship and essence of life were
ingrained in Ranganathan which kept in good stead in his later life to make
decisionsat crucial junctures.
Ranganathan attended the S.M. Hindu
High School at Shiyali and passed Matriculation examination in 1908/1909.
Ranganathan passed the examination in First Class, in spite of sickness like
anaemia, piles, and stammering. In his high school career he came under the
influence of P.A. Subramanya Ayyar, a scholar on Sri Aurobindo. Ranganathan
joined the junior intermediate class at the Madras Christian College in March
1909. Even in those days, there were paucity of college seats. Ranganathan was
picked up for his excellent marks in all the subjects and the principal. Prof.
Skinner spotted him in a crowd of students and admitted him into the course.
Ranganathan passed B.A. with a first class in March/April 1913. In June, same
year, he joined for the M.A. course in Mathematics with Professor Edward B.
Ross as his teacher. Being a favourite student of Prof. Ross, Ranganathan had
an excellent Guru-Shishya relationship.
Ranganathan began his professional life as a mathematician, and he was
successively a member of the mathematics faculties at universities in
Mangalore, Coimbatore and Madras. As a mathematics professor, he published a
handful of papers, mostly on the history of mathematics. His career as an
educator was somewhat hindered by a handicap of stammering.
In 1923, the University of Madras created the post of University Librarian to
oversee their poorly organized collection. Among the 900 applicants for the
position, none had any formal training in librarianship, and Ranganathan's'
handful of papers satisfied the search committee's requirement that the
candidate should have a research background. His sole knowledge of
librarianship came from an Encyclopædia Britannica article he read days before
the interview.
Ranganathan was initially reluctant to pursue the position (he had forgotten
about his application by the time he was called for an interview there). To his
own surprise, he received the appointment and accepted the position in January
1924.
Ranganathan found the solitude of the position
was intolerable. After a matter of weeks, complaining of total boredom, he went
back to the university administration to beg for his teaching position back. A
deal was struck that Ranganthan would travel to London to study contemporary
Western practices in librarianship, and that, if he returned and still rejected
librarianship as a career, the mathematics lectureship would be his again.
Ranganathan travelled to University College London, which at that time housed
the only graduate degree program in library science in Britain. At University
College, he earned marks only slightly above average, but his mathematical mind
latched onto the problem of classification, a subject typically taught by rote
in library programs of the time. As an outsider, he focused on what he
perceived to be flaws with the popular decimal classification, and began to
explore new possibilities on his own.
He
began drafting the system that was ultimately to become the Colon Classification
while in England, and refined it as he returned home, even going so far as to
reorder the ship's library on the voyage back to India. He initially got the
idea for the system from seeing a set of Meccano in a toy store in London.
Ranganathan returned with great interest for libraries and librarianship and a
vision of its importance for the Indian nation. He returned to and held the
position of University Librarian at the University of Madras for twenty years.
During that time, he helped to found the Madras Library Association in 1928,
and lobbied actively for the establishment of free public libraries throughout
India and for the creation of a comprehensive national library.
Ranganathan was considered by many to be a workaholic. During his two decades
in Madras, he consistently worked 13-hour days, seven days a week, without
taking a vacation for the entire time. Although he married in November 1928, he
returned to work the afternoon following the marriage ceremony. A few years
later, he and his wife Sarada had a son. The couple remained married until
Ranganathan's death.
The first few years of Ranganathan's tenure at Madras were years of
deliberation and analysis as he addressed the problems of library
administration and classification. It was during this period that he produced
what have come to be known as his two greatest legacies: his five laws of library
science (1931) and the colon classification system (1933).
Regarding the political climate at the time, Ranganathan took his position at
the University of Madras in 1924. Gandhi had been imprisoned in 1922 and was
released around the time that Ranganathan was taking that job. Ranganathan
sought to institute massive changes to the library system and to write about
such things as open access and education for all which essentially had the
potential to enable the masses and encourage civil discourse. Although there's
no evidence that Ranganthan did any of this for political reasons, his changes
to the library had the result of educating more people, making information
available to all, and even aiding women and minorities in the information-seeking
process.
After two decades of serving as librarian at Madras – a post he had intended to
keep until his retirement, Ranganathan retired from his position after
conflicts with a new university vice-chancellor became intolerable. At the age
of 54, he submitted his resignation and, after a brief bout with depression,
accepted a professorship in library science at Banaras Hindu University in
Varanasi, his last formal academic position, in August 1945. There, he
catalogued the university's collection; by the time he left four years later,
he had classified over 100,000 items personally.
In spite of the good salary he earned, he adopted a Gandhi-like simplicity in
diet and dress. He ate only lightly, shunned coffee and tea, and wore plain homespun
garments. He usually walked barefoot to the library and worked there barefoot,
saying that the library was his home, and no one wears shoes in his own
home. As for his real home, it was sparsely furnished and lacked
electricity, although he could have easily afforded these
amenities. The money he saved through years of frugal living, he
gave away twice. In 1925 to endow a mathematics fellowship at Madras
Christian College in honour of his mathematics professor, Edward B.Ross,
and In 1956 to endow the Sarada Ranganathan chair of library science
at the University of Madras.
Ranganathan headed the Indian Library Association from 1944 to 1953, but was
never a particularly adept administrator, and left amid controversy when the
Delhi Public Library chose to use the Dewey Decimal Classification system
instead of his own Colon Classification. He held an honorary professorship at
Delhi University from 1949 to 1955 and helped build that institution's library
science programs with S. Dasgupta, a former student of his. In 1951,
Ranganathan released an album on Folkways Records entitled, Readings from the
Ramayana: In Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita.
Ranganathan briefly moved to Zurich, Switzerland, from 1955 to 1957, when his
son married a European girl; the unorthodox relationship did not sit well with
Ranganathan, although his time in Zurich allowed him to expand his contacts
within the European library community, where he gained a significant following.
However, he soon returned to India and settled in the city of Bangalore, where
he would spend the rest of his life. While in Zurich, though, he endowed a
professorship at Madras University in honour of his wife of thirty years,
largely as an ironic gesture in retaliation for the persecution he suffered for
many years at the hands of that university's administration.
Ranganathan's final major achievement was the establishment of the
Documentation Research and Training Centre as a department and research centre
in the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore in 1962, where he served as
honorary director for five years. In 1965, the Indian government honoured him
for his contributions to the field with a rare title of "National Research
Professor."
In the final years of his life, Ranganathan finally succumbed to ill health,
and was largely confined to his bed. On September 27, 1972, he died of
complications from bronchitis.
Upon the centenary of his birth in 1992, several biographical volumes and
collections of essays on Ranganathan's influence were published in his honour.
Ranganathan's autobiography, published serially during his life, is titled “A
Librarian Looks Back”.
His Contribution
1. Five Laws of Library science
These were published in 1931. The five laws are the following
simple statements:
Books Are For Use,
Every Reader His Book,
Every Book Its Reader,
Save The Time Of The Reader,
Library Is A Growing Organism
2. Colon
Classification
Ranganathan published his first major work on his new classification system
,the Colon Classification. Its basic principles, however, require
the analysis of a subject to determine its various aspects, called
facets, and the synthesis of a class number from the numbers assigned in
published schedules to different facets. Thus, Colon Classification is known as
an analytico -synthetic classification system. Ranganathan was the first to
fully explicate facet theory, and his work has had a major impact on modern
classification schemes.
3. Classified
Catalogue Code
In 1934 Ranganathan published another important work, the
Classified Catalogue Code. He maintained, however, that a catalogue should
consist of two components.
One
part should be classified by subject, reflecting the library's classification
system, with class number entries. The other should be a dictionary
catalogue, including author, title, series, and similar identifiers, as well as
alphabetized subject entries. The function of a catalogue is to itemize works
so they can be found by author, title, series, and so forth. It must also allow
readers to review the selection of works on a given subject.
4. Chain Index
To
determine subject entries for the dictionary catalogue, He devised an
ingeniously Simple method called chain indexing. This method simply uses each
facet of a subject, together with its immediately preceding facets, as an index
entry. Thus, all important aspects of the subject, from the most
general to the most specific, are automatically covered. Chain indexing can be
adapted to other classification systems as well.
Honours
Ranganathan's
contributions were acknowledged 1964, he was named honorary president of the
Second International Conference on Classification Research, Held in Elsinore,
Denmark.
He also received a number of other high honours.
·
In 1935 and 1957, the
Indian government bestowed on him the honorific title Rao Sahib and the public
service award Padmashri respectively.
·
In 1948, he
received an honorary doctorate of literature from the University of Delhi.
·
In 1964, he
received the same degree from the University of Pittsburgh.
·
In 1965, he was
made a national research professor by the Indian government, and in 1970, he
received the Margaret Mann Citation in Cataloguing and Classification of the
American Library Association (ALA).
·
After his death,
the FID,in 1976, established the Ranganathan award in his memory. This
certificate of merit is awarded biennially for a recent outstanding
contribution in the field of classification.
Dr. Ranganathan’s Laws of Library Science
Original version by Ranganathan1
1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his [or her] book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the User.
5. The library is a growing organism.
Modern version by Crawford & Gorman2
1. Libraries serve humanity.
2. Respect all forms by which knowledge is communicated.
3. Use technology intelligently to enhance service.
4. Protect free access to knowledge.
5. Honor the past and create the future.
Web version byAlireza Nuruzi3
1. Web resources are for use.
2. Every user has his or her web resource.
3. Every web resource its user.
4. Save the time of the user.
5. The Web is a growing organism.
Ref.
1 Ranganathan, S. R. The Five Laws of Library Science. London: Edward Goldston. 1931.
2 Crawford, W., & Gorman, M. Future libraries: dreams, madness & reality. Chicago and London,
American Library Association, 1995.
3 Noruzi, A. (2004). ʺApplication of Ranganathanʹs Laws to the Web.ʺ Webology, 1(2), Article 8.
Available at: http://www.webology.ir/2004/v1n2/a8.html.
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