Happy birthday to the Father of Library and information Science
Dear LIS Professionals/ Students,
Let's wish Happy birthday on the memories of Dr. S R Ranganathan, the Father of Library and information Science.
His original birthday is on 9th August 1982 but official records on 12th August 1982 which has been celebrated as the Librarian's Day in India
Let's know about the father of
Library Science
|
|
Born
|
Shiyali
Ramamrita Ranganathan
12 August 1892
Shiyali,
British
India (present-day Tamil Nadu,
India)
|
Died
|
27 September 1972 (aged 80)
Bangalore,
India
|
Occupation
|
Author, academic, mathematician,
librarian
|
Nationality
|
Indian
|
Genre
|
Library
Science, Documentation, Information Science
|
Notable
works
|
Prolegomena to Library
Classification
The Five Laws of Library Science
Colon Classification
Ranganathan: the Man and the Mathematician
Classified Catalogue Code: With Additional Rules for Dictionary Catalogue
Code
Library Administration
Indian Library Manifesto
Library Manual for Library Authorities, Librarians, and Library Workers
Classification and Communication
Headings and Canons; Comparative Study of Five Catalogue Codes
|
Siyali (at
present, Sirkazhi) Ramamrita Ranganathan (S.R.R.) शियाली राममृत रंगनाथन; 12August 1892 –
27 September 1972) was a mathematician and librarian from India. His most
notable contributions to the field were 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 Banaras 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 an honorary
member of the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID)
and was made a vice-president for life of the Library Association of Great
Britain.
Early
life and education
Ranganathan, born on 12 August 1892
to Ramamrita, in Siyali (at present, Sirkazhi) in British-ruled India at
Tanjavoor (at present, Nagapattinam) District, Tamilnadu
Ranganathan began his professional
life as a mathematician; he earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in mathematics from Madras
Christian College in his home province, and then went on to earn a teaching
license. His lifelong goal was to teach mathematics, and he was successively a
member of the mathematics faculties at universities in Mangalore, Coimbatore
and Madras (all within the span of five years). 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 (a difficulty
Ranganathan gradually overcame in his professional life). The Government of
India awarded Padmashri to Dr. S.R. Ranganathan in 1957 for valuable
contributions to Library Science.
Early
career
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.
At first, Ranganathan found the
solitude of the position was intolerable. In 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 Ranganathan 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 also devised the Acknowledgment
of Duplication, which states that any system of classification of information
necessarily implies at least two different classifications for any given datum.
He anecdotally proved this with the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) by
taking several books and showing how each might be classified with two totally
different resultant DDC numbers. (For example, a book on "warfare in
India" could be classified under "warfare" or "India".
Even a general book on warfare could be classified under "warfare",
"history","social organisation","Indian
essays",or many other headings, depending upon the viewpoint, needs, and
prejudices of the classifier.) To a mind such as Ranganathan's, a structured,
step-by-step system acknowledging each facet of the topic of the work was immensely
preferable to the anarchy and "intellectual laziness" (as he termed
it) of the DDC. Given the poor technology for information retrieval available
at that time, the implementation of this concept was a tremendous step forwards
for the science of information retrieval. The system remains useful even into
the modern times. It is useful for its simplicity, predictability, and depth in
comparison to classification on a linguistic level, such as is used by search
engines such as Google.
He began drafting the system that
was ultimately to become 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, 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 (and disobedience). Although there's no evidence that
Ranganathan 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.
The Northern Ireland crisis got an
unexpected metaphorical reference in a book by S. R. Ranganathan, as
"making an Ulster of the ... law of parsimony", complaining about the
harmful effects of low budget on the good functioning of a library.
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.
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 center 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 27 September 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.
Ref -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
