Brief Biography of Dr.

SR Ranganathan
Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan (S.R.R.)[1] ( listen (help·info) 12 August 1892 – 27 September 1972)
was a librarian and mathematician from India. [2] His most notable contributions to the field were his five
laws of library science and the development of the first major faceted classification system, the colon
classification.[3] 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 Librarian's Day in India.[4]
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.[5]

Early life and education[edit]

Ranganathan, born on 9 August 1892(Real) to Ramamrita, in Siyali (at present, Sirkazhi) in British-ruled
India at Tanjavoor (at present, Ubayavethanthapuram, Thiruvarur District), Tamil Nadu. [1] His birth date is
also written 12 August 1892 but he himself wrote his birth date 9 August 1892 in his book, The Five Laws
of Library Science.
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. As a mathematics professor,
he published papers mainly on the history of mathematics. His career as an educator was somewhat
hindered by stammering (a difficulty he 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. [6]

Early career[edit]
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. [1]
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.[7]
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 genius 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. [8]
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. [9] 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 Ranganathan, 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.
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. The system remains useful even into the modern times. 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. [9]
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. [10] 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).[11]
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 is 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.

Ranganathan on a 1992 stamp of India

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. [7] 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
woman; 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 spent 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 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, Ranganathan suffered from ill health and was largely confined to his bed. On
27 September 1972, he finally succumbed to complications from bronchitis.[12]
Upon the 1992 centenary of his birth, 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.

Influence[edit]
Ranganathan dedicated his book The Five Laws of Library Science to his maths tutor at Madras Christian
College, Edward Burns Ross.[13]
National Library of India
The National Library of India is a library located in Belvedere Estate, Alipore, Kolkata, India.[3] It is
India's largest library by volume and public record.[4][5][6] The National Library is under Ministry of
Culture, Government of India. The library is designated to collect, disseminate and preserve printed
material produced within India. With a collection in excess of 2.2 million books and records, it is the
largest in the country.[7] Before independence, it was the official residence of Governor-General of
India.
The National Library is a result of the merging of the public library with the Imperial Library—several
government libraries. The National Library (1953), then the Imperial Library housed several foreign
(British) and Indian titles and was open to the public. [8] It collects book, periodicals, and titles in
virtually all the Indian languages while the special collections in the National Library of India house at
least fifteen languages.[8] The Hindi department has books that date back all the way to the
nineteenth century and the first ever books printed in that language. The collections break down and
consist of 86,000 maps and 3,200 manuscripts.[8]

The Imperial Library[edit]

The Imperial Library was formed in 1891 by combining a number of Secretariat libraries in Calcutta.
Of those, the most important and interesting was the library of the Home Department, which
contained many books formerly belonging to the library of East India College, Fort William and the
library of the East India Board in London. But the use of the library was restricted to the superior
officers of the Government. [9] Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee was appointed as the president of imperial
library council (1910) to which he donated his personal collection of 80,000 books arranged in a
separate section.
After independence the Government of India changed the name of the Imperial Library to the
National Library by Imperial Library (Change of Name) Act, 1948, and the collection was transferred
from The Esplanade to the present Belvedere Estate. On 1 February 1953 the National Library was
opened to the public by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.[10] The name of National Library was changed
to National Library of India by section 18 of the National Library of India Act, 1976.

Discovery of hidden chamber[edit]

In 2010, the Ministry of Culture, the owner of the library, decided to get the library building restored
by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). While taking stock of the library building, the
conservation engineers discovered a previously unknown room. The secret ground-floor room, about
1000 sq. ft. in size, seems to have no opening of any kind. [11]
The ASI archaeologists tried to search the first floor area (that forms the ceiling of the room) for a
trap door, but found nothing. Since the building is of historical and cultural importance, ASI has
decided to bore a hole through the wall instead of breaking it. There are speculations about the room
being a punishment room used by Warren Hastings and other British officials, or a place to store
treasure.[11]
In 2011, the researchers announced that the room was filled entirely with mud, probably in an effort
to stabilize the building.