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Ranganathan's importance

Chew Chiat Naun

To cite this article: Chew Chiat Naun (1994) Ranganathan's importance, The Australian Library
Journal, 43:4, 219-225, DOI: 10.1080/00049670.1994.10755691

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Ranganathan's importance
Chew Chiat Naun is currently enrolled in
the MA (Librarianship) program in the
Graduate Department of Librarianship,
Archives and Records at Monash University.
He is also employed at the Sir Louis Math-
eson Library at Monash University.
Manuscript received March 1994
A prolific and outspoken figure greatly
admired by some ofhis most prominent con-
temporaries, S.R. Ranganathan was a
thinker whose contribution to librarianship
was not less far-reaching for being essen-
tially theoretical. His 'Five Laws ofLibrary
Science' encapsulate a view of the aims of
the profession which still prevails, while his
work on classification theory based on facet
analysis has inspired important and con-
tinuing work in the field of automated
information retrieval.
This essay was awarded the Australian
Library and InformationAssociation 's 1994
Metcalfe Medallion. It was originally writ-
ten for assessment in the unit 'History of
libraries and information agencies' in the
Graduate Department of Librarianship,
Archives and Records at Monash University.
HIYALI Ramamrita Ranganathan
S (1892-1972) hadalongandimmense-
lyproductive career in librarianship,
during the course of which he
expounded- articulately and with unflag-
ging ardour- views on almost every aspect
of the profession, from reference service
THE AUSTRALIAN LIBRARY JOURNAL NOVEMBER 1994
John Metcalfe was responsible for estab-
lishing the basis ofthe profession of librarianship
in Australia and was the dominating influence
in the profession in this country until his retire-
ment in the 1960's. John Metcalfe and his
contribution to librarianship and library edu-
cation are commemorated by the Australian
Library and Information Association through
the Metcalfe Medallion.
The award is for the most outstanding essay
or other piece of work on a topic of interest to
library and information services and consists
of a medallion and ayear's membership of the
Association. Students are invited to submit
entries for this award.
To meet the criteria for this award entries
for the ALIA Metcalfe Medallion should:
• be submitted in triplicate by astudent under-
taking a first award course in library and
information science;
• be an essay or other piece of work of up to
5000 words in length of interest to library
and information science;
• be written in a forrn or style appropriate for
publishing in an ALIA journal or as an ALIA
Press publication;
• indicate competence in the analysis, eval-
uation or synthesis of data, information or
previously published material;
• include a declaration stating that the entry
is the student's own work.
219
Ranganathan's importance
to public library legislation, and from cat-
aloguing standards to international
co-operation. Jesse Sherasaid that 'one can-
not properly judge the work of S.R.
Ranganathan without reference to the
totality oflibrarianship'. 1 According to A. C.
Foskett, 'Ranganathan's contributions to
librarianship must rank in breadth and sig-
nificance with those of Dewey.' 2 Of
Ranganathan's contributions, the most
enduring - and certainly the best known
- are the Five Laws of Library Science
and the analytico-synthetic approach to clas-
sification embodied in the Colon
Classification. These are notable contri-
butions to the theoretical underpinnings
of librarianship. In a profession in which
respect for precedent has traditionally mat-
tered more than reflection upon principles,
Ranganathan is remarkable for having
prompted among librarians some funda-
mental reassessment of the aims and
methods of their work.
Ranganathan's importance as a
theorist
It is because Ranganathan's importance
was chiefly as a theorist that the magni-
tude of his contribution to librarianship is
not easy to judge. To say that Dewey devised
the Decimal Classification, or that Putnam
initiated the Library of Congress card dis-
tribution service, is already to say a good
deal about the significance ofthose persons
in the history of the profession, since those
developments have had a decisive and con-
tinuing impact on the professional lives of
librarians everywhere.
By contrast, Ranganathan's influence,
though no less real, is less tangible. The
Colon Classification has never found wide
acceptance in practice; even in India, it is
favoured only by a minority of libraries.
Nor did Ranganathan occupy, in his most
220 THE AUSTRALIAN LIBRARY JOURNAL NOVEMBER 1994
productive years, any particularly influential
post in the library world. His most impor-
tant work was done while he was Librarian
at the University of Madras (1924-1944),
and later, more prestigious appointments
came in recognition of his contributions to
librarianship, rather than being the pri-
mary vehicle for those contributions. And
while Ranganathan was undoubtedly a very
influential figure in the development of
library services in post-colonial India,
events in that country have had little direct
impact on the practice of librarianship in
the rest of the world. In other words,
Ranganathan's contribution to librarian-
ship is to be assessed not by the extent of
his deeds, however prodigious, but by the
value of his ideas.
The Five Laws of Library Science
To the wider community of librarians,
Ranganathan's name is probably identified
most closely with the Five Laws of Library
Science. The Five Laws are as follows:
(1) Books are for use
(2) Every reader his book
(3) Every book its reader
(4) Save the time of the reader
(5) A library is a growing organism.
The Five Laws of Library Science were
first enunciated in 1931 in Ranganathan's
book of that title, in which he claimed to
have put librarianship on a scientific foot-
ing. They preface every book he wrote
thereafter. In the professional literature they
are often quoted epigrammatically; many
librarians have adopted them as a profes-
sional credo, 3 and there have been attempts
to apply them systematically to the evalu-
ation oflibrary services.4 Certainly the Five
Laws offer an elegant and succinct expres-
sion of the essential aims oflibrary service
as we understand it today, and perhaps it

is a measure of Ranganathan's influence
that to us they seem so self-evident, even
trivial.
Ranganathan intended the Five Laws to
be the counterpart in librarianship of sci-
entific laws such as Newton's three laws of
motion. Whether Ranganathan's laws real-
ly have that status is perhaps not a question
that needs to be settled here. My own feel-
ing is that they do not, because they rest
on a particular view of the role oflibraries
in human affairs - a view for which
Ranganathan offers no independent justi-
fication. What matters, though, is not so
much the justification as the nature of the
view itself.
It is not difficult, with hindsight, to dis-
cern in the Five Laws the underlying notion
that libraries should be service-oriented
rather than collection-oriented; that libraries
exist not only to store books, but also to
make them available to people. This empha-
sis on accessibility, in turn, is characteristic
of the broader idea that libraries can be an
instrument of social betterment through
the education ofindividuals. Ranganathan's
view of the role of libraries comes out
strongly in his writings on reference ser-
vice, in which he derides libraries for
'hoarding' their collections and argues for
the provision of reference services not only
to facilitate, but indeed actively to promote,
the use of collections. 5
Ranganathan had been deeply impressed
by his observations of public library ser-
vices in Britain while a student there in
1924-25 - he visited some 120 libraries
over two years - and he would have taken
home with him something of the ethos of
British public libraries of the period.
Perhaps, also, those ideals chimed with
Ranganathan's Hindu beliefs about human
perfectibility. 6 That sense of high purpose
THE AUSTRALIAN LIBRARY JOURNAL NOVEMBER 1994
Ranganathan's importance
would, naturally, flourish in the climate of
fervent nationalism that prevailed in India
over the decades leading up to and imme-
diately following her attainment of
independence in 1947. The reforms which
Ranganathan so energetically implement-
ed or advocated in his own country- among
them the change to open access, the pass-
ing of public library legislation, and the
establishment of professional qualifica-
tions7- owe much to his early experiences
in Britain.
In many ways, then, Ranganathan was
a product ofhis times. His faith in the social
efficacy oflibraries was perhaps the clear-
est symptom of this fact. Significantly,
nothing in the Five Laws offers any useful
guidance about what sort ofbooks libraries
should acquire. That was recognised to be
a fundamental problem only by a later gen-
eration of librarians. What made
Ranganathan something more than sim-
ply the man who brought modern Western
methods to Indian libraries (itself a suffi-
cient claim to fame.), and what makes him
an important figure today, was his gift for
abstraction and generalisation. On the one
hand, he was able to distil a philosophy of
librarianship into something as succinct as
the Five Laws. On the other hand, he had
the perspicacity to see the ramifications that
the same philosophy would have for the prac-
tice oflibrarianship.
Agreat many of the views Ranganathan
espoused strike us now as prescient. As
early as 1948, he urged the Library of
Congress to implement what he called 'pre-
natal' cataloguing- what we now know as
cataloguing-in-publication. 8 He was prob-
ably the first to advocate the extensive use
of statistical methods ('librametrics') in
library management, something which in
one form or another is commonplace today. 9
221
Ranganathan's importance
He was an early proponent of the central-
isation of technical services. 10 And he
foresaw clearly the need for what he called
'documentation'-detailed bibliographic con-
trol of the contents of periodicals and
ephemera. 11
Colon Classification
Ranganathan's powers of abstraction
and generalisation are formidably in evi-
dence in his work on classification, the area
in which he made his greatest contribution
to librarianship. His rival and critic, H.E.
Bliss, acknowledged Ranganathan's achieve-
ment in these words: 'Ranganathan's mind
comprehends the immense diversity and
intricacy of objects, aspects, and relations
in nature and in life.' 12
The first edition ofthe Colon Classification
appeared in 1933, after several years' devel-
opment at Madras. It was followed in 1937
by a comprehensive treatise on classifica-
tion theory, the Prolegomena to library
classification, which may be regarded as
providing the Colon Classification's theo-
retical foundation. In these works
Ranganathan set forth a theory of classi-
fication which had at its heart the idea of
analysing the subject-matter of a book into
its component concepts and exhibiting the
relationships in which those concepts stand.
This was the theory of analytico-synthetic
classification. In its mature form, the the-
ory postulated five fundamental categories
of concepts (or 'facets'): personality, mat-
ter, energy, space and time, the famous
PMEST schema. 13 The significance of this
approach to classification, in essence, was
that it enabled subject content to be artic-
ulated with a subtlety not permitted by
traditional 'tree-of-knowledge' schemes. 14
In so doing, it took several strides further
the process begun by Dewey of breaking
down what Shera and Perry have called
'the old dichotomy between a classification
222 THE AUSTRALIAN LIBRARY JOURNAL NOVEMBER 1994
of books and a classification of knowl-
edge.'15
Ranganathan's was not the first scheme
to essay a faceted approach to classifica-
tion. There are elements of faceting in the
Universal Decimal Classification's use of
auxiliary tables, and Bliss had already laid
some of the theoretical groundwork in his
principle of complex (or composite) classi-
fication.16 However, it was Ranganathan who
gave the idea by far its fullest expression
and developed it into the basis of a system
of classification. Later generations of clas-
sificationists would acknowledge
Ranganathan as the originator of modern
classification theory, 17 and many ofthe terms
he introduced into the discipline, such as
'isolate', 'hospitality' and of course 'facet',
have become part of the professional lexi-
con.
Obstacles to acceptance of Colon
Classification
Why then, in view of its virtues, did the
Colon Classification largely fail to take hold?
No doubt the hegemony of the Decimal
Classification inhibited acceptance of rival
schemes. However, there are more spe-
cific reasons for the Colon Classification's
lack of popularity. There was the style of
Ranganathan's writing, which many
Westerners found, or professed to find, alien
and inaccessible. 18 (Should it not have giv-
en them pause that Ranganathan, an
Indian and a Brahman, had assimilated a
vast amount of Western science and liter-
ature seemingly with no difficulty at all?
But perhaps this is beside the point.) It is
also true that books printed in the Indian
sub-continent have always had an unfor-
tunate reputation, deserved or undeserved,
for being littered with misprints - and a
classification schedule is no place for mis-
prints.

However, the greatest obstacle to ready
acceptance ofthe Colon Classification prob-
ably lies in theverytemperofRanganathan's
work. Even athis most genial, Ranganathan
is unfailingly rigorous and exacting. This
is doubtless a virtue ina theorist, but when
rigour overrides considerations of practi-
cal facility, the theory's practical aspirations
are bound to suffer. Bliss's verdict that
Ranganathan's ideas were 'more ingenious
than available' 19 was probably shared by
many - not least John Metcalfe himself.
Ranganathan's reluctance to sacrifice
expressivity of notation for brevity is one
example of his zeal for theoretical symme-
try; his opposition to the provision of
alternative class numbers is another. There
is a case for looking upon the Colon
Classification as being less a workable
scheme in its own right than a working mod-
el designed to illustrate Ranganathan's
theoretical principles.
Ranganathan's influence
That the soundness of the principles was
not fundamentally in doubt is evidenced
by the extent of Ranganathan's influence
on other classificationists. The fifties and
sixties were a period of intense activity in
classification research, with Ranganathan
often the protagonist or subject or both.
Ranganathan's general classification
scheme may have fallen into neglect, but
it spawned a host of special classification
schemes constructed on similar principles,
such as the British Catalogue of Music
Classification and the Classification of
Library and Information Science. A num-
ber of these schemes were the work of
members of the Classification Research
Group (CRG), which was formed in London
in 1952 to investigate issues relating to clas-
sification. It maintained close links with
Ranganathan, both personally and philo-
sophically, over the next two decades.
THE AUSTRALIAN LIBRARY JOURNAL NOVEMBER 1994
Ranganathan's importance
During the same period, Ranganathan
was also deeply involved in the work
of the International Federation for
Documentation's Committee on General
Classification, of which he was Rapporteur-
General (1950-56), and in the work of the
Documentation Research and Training
Centre (DRTC), which he founded in
Bangalore in 1962. The theory of ana-
lytico-synthetic classification received
widespread attention in a series of inter-
national conferences in Dorking,
Washington, Cleveland and Elsinore
between 1957 and 1964, and in the pages
of such journals as Abgila, Library Science
with a Slant to Documentation (founded by
Ranganathan in 1964), Libri and
International Classification. The Lake
Placid Foundation paid its own tribute to
Ranganathan's influence with the publi-
cation in 1965 of the seventeenth edition
of the Decimal Classification, which intro-
duced an Areas table and extensive use of
synthesis.
It was not Ranganathan's work, in iso-
lation, which led to the upsurge of interest
in classification theory. The post-war peri-
od also saw the rapid rise of computer
technology, with the attendant recognition
ofits potential in information retrieval. Facet
theory attracted interest because it offered
a principled and systematic way of organ-
ising knowledge, a way which would be
amenable to computer-based techniques.
(Significantly, Ranganathan often uses the
word 'mechanise' as a metaphor for the deter-
minate ordering ofelements ofinformation.)
It was pointed out that the analytico-
synthetic method permitted the handling
not only of brute subject headings, but of
thesaurally relatable terms; and not only
ofBoolean aggregates of terms, but of syn-
tactically significant concatenations of
terms. 20 As long as classification served only
223
Ranganathan's importance
to determine shelf arrangement, and sub-
ject-matter was accessible only through
laboriously constructed card entries, these
remained somewhat academic distinctions.
But with the new power of computers to
manipulate data these ideas took on much
greater significance.
Demonstrable success came in the ear-
ly seventies with the adoption by the British
National Bibliography of PRECIS (the
Preserved Context Indexing System),
devised by the CRG's Derek Austin. This
system, a descendant of Ranganathan's
Chain Procedure, applies facet analysis to
index headings in a way which enables com-
puters to generate additional entries by
rotating the terms. 21 PRECIS was subse-
quently adopted by several other national
agencies.
The full impact of the Ranganathanian
research programme is probably yet to be
felt. Of particular note is work currently
being done on the design of online infor-
mation retrieval systems on
analytico-synthetic principles; facet analy-
sis offers promising insights into matters
like thesaurus construction and the fram-
ing of queries. 22 Indeed, as I have already
suggested, the whole of Ranganathan's
philosophy seems to anticipate modern
developments in librarianship, especially
those developments wrought by advances
in technology. Future generations oflibrar-
ians may well look upon Ranganathan as
a Colossus bestriding the pre- and post-
automation eras in librarianship.
References
1. Quoted in K.G.B. Bakewell's article on
Ranganathan in the ALA Encyclopedia
of library and information services, ed.
by Robert Wentworth. (Chicago,
American Library Association, 2 ed
1986), pp. 690-692.
224 THE AUSTRALIAN LIBRARY JOURNAL NOVEMBER 1994
2. A.C. Foskett, The subject approach to
information. 4th ed. (London, 1982),
p.408.
3. See Pauline A. Atherton,Putting knowl-
edge to work: an American view of
Ranganathan's five laws of library sci-
ence. (Delhi, 1973), p.36.
4. Ibid.
5. S.R. Ranganathan,Reference service. 2nd
ed. (Bombay, 1961), pp.27-28.
6. Cf Marcia H. Chappell, 'The place of
reference service in Ranganathan's the-
ory oflibrarianship', Library Quarterly
46 (4), pp.378-96.
7. For an outline ofRanganathan's views
on these subjects, see S.R. Ranganathan,
Preface to library science (Delhi, 1948).
8. See R.S. Saksena, 'India's contribution
to library science' in P.N. Kaula (ed.),
Ranganathan festschrift, Vol.1 (London,
1965), p.628.
9. For a recent development of
Ranganathan's thoughts in this area,
see F.J. Devadason and H.A. Vespry,
'Library staff requirement planning
assistant: a PC-based system' in John
Weckert and Craig McDonald (eds.),
Intelligent library systems, (Wagga
Wagga, NSW, 1992), pp.119-134.
10. S.R. Ranganathan, Preface to library sci-
ence, pp.l29-130.
11. S.R. Ranganathan, Classification and
communication. (Delhi, 1951), pp.l07-
110.
12. H.E. Bliss, The organization of knowl-
edge in libraries and the
subject-approach to books. 2nd ed. (New
York, 1939), p.300.
13. PMEST first appears in the fourth edi-
tion of S.R. Ranganathan, Colon
classification, published in 1952.

14. For Vickery's phrase, see B.C. Vickery,
Faceted classification: a guide to con-
struction and use of special schemes.
(London, 1960), p.8.
15. Jesse H. Shera and James W. Perry,
'Changing concepts of classification:
philosophical and education implica-
tions' in P.N. Kaula (ed.), op. cit., p.44.
16. See Bliss, op. cit., p.43.
17. See, inter alia, Elaine Svenonius,
'Ranganathan and classification sci-
ence',Libri 42 (3), July-September 1992,
pp.176-183.
18. 'The oriental mind may comprehend it,
tho the occidental would hardly essay
to undertake it'- Bliss, op. cit., p.299.
19. Private letter from Bliss to Childs (1948)
quoted by Susan Bury in 'Ranganathan's
theories embodied in both colon classi-
THE AUSTRALIAN LIBRARY JOURNAL NOVEMBER 1994
Ranganathan's importance
fication and the second edition of Bliss'
bibliographic classification' in T.S.
Rajagopalan (ed.), Relevance of
Ranganathan's contributions to library
science. (New Dehli, 1988), pp.52-53.
20. Thesepointsarepithilymadein Vickery,
op. cit., p.8. See also Mary Dykstra, 'PRE-
CIS in the online catalog', Cataloging
and Classification Quarterly 10 (1-2),
1989, pp.81-94.
21. Derek Austin and Jeremy A. Digger,
'PRECIS: the Preserved Context Index
System', Library Resources and
Technical Services 21 (1), Winter 1977,
pp.l3-30.
22. See Peter Ingwersen and Irene Wormell,
'Ranganathan in the perspective of
advanced information retrieval', Libri
42 (3), July-September 1992, pp.l84-201.
225