Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan Listen (help·info) (Tamil:சீகாழி/சீர்காழி ராமாமிருத ரங்கநாதன், ciyali rāmāmiruta raṅkanātaṉ[?]) (August 9, 1892, Sirkali, Tamil Nadu – September 27, 1972, Bangalore) 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.
Ranganathan, born on 9 August 1892, came from a moderate background in British-ruled India. He was born in the small town of Shiyali (now known as Sirkazhi), in the state of Tamil Nadu in South India.
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.
At first, 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.
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. (Simply put, for example, a book on "warfare in India" could be classified under "warfare" or "India". Even a book on warfare in general 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. The importance of this concept, given the poor technology for information retrieval available at that time, cannot be overestimated. Even in modern terms the concept is attractive for its simplicity, predictability, and depth in comparison to classification on a linguistic level, such as is used by search engines such as Google.
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. He and his wife Sarada had one child, a son, a few years later, and they stayed married until Ranganathan's death.
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