Asifa Ali
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan (S.R. Ranganathan) Father of Library and Information Science movement in India was born on 9th August 1892 in Shiyali in Tanjavoor District of Tamil Nadu. During his school days, Ranganathan came under the influence of two of his teachers R. Antharama Ayyar and Thiruvenkatachariar, the Sanskrit teacher who shaped his mind. Ranganathan attended the S.M. Hindu High School at Shiyali and passed Matriculation examination in 1909 with First Class and passed B.A. with first 1913. In June, same year, he joined the M.A. class in Mathematics. Ranganathan did his Master’s degree in 1916 and he wanted to be a teacher in Mathematics. In July 1921, he joined the Presidency College, Madras as Assistant Professor of Mathematics.
S. R. Ranganathan, who is known as “Father of Library Science in India”, was the first person one who identified the real need of libraries and library science education in our country. He started the Library Science Department in the year 1931 at Madras University and it became the first state in our country to enact the Madras Public Library Act. In 1947 he became a Professor of Library Science in Delhi University. He was Chairman of the UGC Library Commission and started DRTC (Documentation Research and Training Centre) at Bangalore to promote the research activities in the field of Library and Information Science. 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 Encyclopedia Britannica article he read days before the interview. Ranganathan was initially reluctant to pursue the position. To his own surprise, he received the appointment and accepted the position in January 1924. 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.
After two decades of serving as librarian at 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. Das gupta, a former student of his. 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, he died on 28 September, 1972 at the age of 80. His life was a symbol of immortality and the best way to remember him is to publish good books, start well-equipped libraries in schools and also popularize the library movement in rural areas. In his honour India celebrates August 12 as Librarians Day.
His Major Contribution in the field of Library and Information Science
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 (CCC)
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
5. Publications
Although Ranganathan’s works on classification and cataloging are his best recognized contributions, he published over 50 books and 1,000 papers on all aspects. In addition, he founded and edited three periodicals:
i. The Indian Library Association Annals, Bulletin and Granthalaya;
ii. The Annals of Library Science;
iii. Library Science with a Slant to Documentation
6. 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 Padamashri 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.
(The author is a Research Scholar at the Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kashmir. Views are his own)
