Ranganathan's Five Laws

Building your library is much like building your mind.

An historical figure with whom I have an odd fascination is Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, more commonly called S.R. Ranganathan in print and just called Ranganathan in this newsletter. He is a pivotal figure in a discipline that is often overlooked and almost always under-appreciated: library science.

Ranganathan personal life is interesting — while being an adept practitioner of library science and one of its foremost theoreticians, he did not excel at getting his ideas put into practice. His colon classification system, for instance, never supplanted the Dewey Decimal system.

But today I want to talk about something more general — Ranganathan’s Five Laws. These are laws that were designed for library science, back when librarians dealt with the classification of large amounts of physical volumes. But I think we’ll see that there is a general applicability to his ideas.

Books are for use.

Every reader his book.

Every book its reader.

Save the time of the reader.

A library is a growing organism.

These laws are inscribed on the first page of Ranganathan’s Prolegomena to Library Classification, a 600-page tome on the theory and practice of library science. Even before reaching the contents page, the reader meets these laws. They are the laws that govern everything that Ranganathan tries to do.