Ranganathan’s 5 laws of library science

Many years ago when I was a grad­u­ate stu­dent, I learned about S.A. Ran­ganathan, a math­e­mati­cian and librar­ian for India who is often called the “father of library sci­ence.” Dur­ing his dis­tin­guished career, he devel­oped the five laws of library sci­ence, and even though his laws are more than 50 years old, I think they still hold true today and have an impor­tant influ­ence on the staff of the Delaware County Dis­trict Library.

His first law is “books are for use.” That sounds pretty obvi­ous, but Ran­ganathan observed that in his time peo­ple were often pro­hib­ited from tak­ing books out of a library and the empha­sis was on stor­age and preser­va­tion rather than use. He rea­soned that with­out a book being used, there is very lit­tle value to it.

“Every reader his or her book” is his sec­ond law, sug­gest­ing that every mem­ber of the com­mu­nity should be able to obtain library mate­ri­als as needed, regard­less of social, eco­nomic or edu­ca­tional sta­tus. Fur­ther, he believed that librar­i­ans should have first-hand knowl­edge of those they serve and libraries should pro­mote and adver­tise their services.

“Every book its reader,” empha­siz­ing that each item in a library should be use­ful to some­one in the community.

“Save the time of the reader” rec­og­nizes that part of the excel­lence of library ser­vice is its abil­ity to meet the needs of the library cus­tomer efficiently.

And Ranganathan’s fifth law is “The library is a grow­ing organ­ism.” This law focused on the need for a library to accom­mo­date growth with mate­ri­als, phys­i­cal space, read­ing areas, shelv­ing and staff.

The Delaware County librar­i­ans don’t rit­u­al­is­ti­cally and rou­tinely recite these five laws by any means, but they pro­vide the under­pin­ning for the excel­lent cus­tomer ser­vice that we pro­vide. While we may not be able to say them by heart, we cer­tainly stand by their intent.

When and where will the next Win­ter Olympics by held?

Accord­ing to the offi­cial Olympics web­site, olympic.org, the city of Sochi has been elected host city of the XXII Olympic Win­ter Games in 2014. Sochi has a pop­u­la­tion of 400,000 peo­ple and is sit­u­ated in Krasnodar, which is the third largest region in Rus­sia. The Games will be orga­nized in two clus­ters: a coastal clus­ter for ice events in Sochi, and a moun­tain clus­ter located in the Kras­naya Polyana Mountains.

Are there rules for fight­ing in hockey?

The rule­books of the NHL and The Rules of the Game con­tain spe­cific rules for fight­ing. These rules state that at the ini­ti­a­tion of a fight, both play­ers must drop their sticks and not use them as weapons. Play­ers must also “drop” or shake off their pro­tec­tive gloves in order to fight bare-knuckled (essen­tially, “throw­ing down the gaunt­let”), as the hard leather and plas­tic of hockey gloves would increase the effect of landed blows. Play­ers must also heed a ref­eree warn­ing to end a fight once the oppo­nents have been sep­a­rated. Fail­ure to adhere to any of these rules results in an imme­di­ate game mis­con­duct penalty and the pos­si­bil­ity of fines and sus­pen­sion from future games.

How did Jeff Healey lose his eyesight?

The late blues rocker Jeff Healey lost his eye­sight to can­cer when he was one year old. Two years later, he was given his first gui­tar. Though he was shown the usual way to hold the instru­ment, he found it more com­fort­able on his lap, with his fret­ting hand above the neck. His unortho­dox approach con­tributed to the amaz­ingly fluid, soul­ful style that helped him sell mil­lions of records in the mid-80s. Healey was also accom­plished on trum­pet and clar­inet, play­ing old time jazz. He died at age 41 in 2008. I found this infor­ma­tion in The New Grove Dic­tio­nary of Music and Musicians.

If you have a ques­tion that you would like to see answered in this col­umn, mail it to Mary Jane San­tos, Delaware County Dis­trict Library, 84 E. Win­ter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call 740–362-3861. You can also email your ques­tions by vis­it­ing delawarelibrary.org or directly to Mary Jane at mjsantos@delawarelibrary.org. No mat­ter how you con­tact us, we’re always glad you asked.

Posted by Mary Santos on Apr 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.