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Books are for use: Ranganathan centennial year

Ranganathan

During the 19th and 20th centuries, two great librarians—Melvil Dewey (1851-1931) of the United States and S. R. Ranganathan (1892-1972) of India—were responsible for the development of library and information science. In this centennial year of Ranganathan’s birth it is impor- tant to recall his many contribu- tions.

Born on August 9, 1892, Ranganathan may most com- monly be remembered for his for- mulation of laws. In 1929 he felt that librarianship lacked a set of unifying, guiding principles and set down the following: books are for use; every reader has his book, every book its reader; save the time of the reader, save the time of library staff; and the library is a growing organism.

In 1925 he introduced the Colon Classification, a radical departure from the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress Classification systems. In 1934 he published the Classified Catalogue code which showed that an analytico-synthetic approach is useful irrespective of what scheme for classification is used for developing a structured subject index.

After spreading his reforms throughout In- dia, Ranganathan was active in international librarianship from 1948 until his death on Sep- tember 27, 1972. A visionary, he predicted in the 1950s that computers would play an important part in libraries and that online catalogs would replace the card catalog in all types of librar- ies. He coined such terms as “facet,” “phase,” “isolate,” “librametrics,” and “chain proce- dure” and his ideas on biblio- graphic instruction, faculty status, and internships for librarians have become popular in Western coun- tries. During his lifetime he wrote 62 books and over 2,000 articles on all aspects of library science.

At its 1992 Midwinter Meeting, the Council of the American Library Association passed two resolutions in honor of Ranganathan. One said “that the ALA on the birth centennial of an international giant, S. R. Ranganathan, expresses the gratitude of its members to him for his contributions, many years of dedication and outstanding services to the promotion of international librarianship.”—R. N. Sharma, University of Evansville ■