Philosophy of Library Classification
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...Ranganathan has had many followers in library and information science (LIS) and his name occurs in most textbooks about bibliographic classification and knowledge organization. He, as well as other classification researchers (except Vickery), is not, however, much cited in the research literature, and does not appear on White and McCain’s (1998, p. 343 + p. 350) maps of information science.(17) It has, moreover, been extremely difficult to trace critical examinations of this approach. Lancaster, Zeter, and Metzler (1992) wrote about the way Ranganathan is quoted in the literature:...
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...Ranganathan himself derived inspiration for his Colon Classification from Meccano, which he came across in a London toy shop whilst studying at University College London (UCL) in 1924 (Broughton, 2007). S.R. Ranganathan wrote in his Philosophy of Library Classification (1951): ‘‘An enumerative scheme with a superficial foundation can be suitable and even economical for a closed system of knowledge ....
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...2 ‘‘The semantic and syntactic structure of Ranganathan’s language may serve to hinder easy comprehension of his principles of facet analysis. Sentences such as ‘The denotation of a term . . . should be determined in the light of the different classes or ranked isolates of lower order (upper links) belonging to the same primary chain as the class or the ranked isolate denoted by the term in question’ (Ranganathan, 1967, 208) tend to leave some doubt as to what Ranganathan is trying to say (i.e. that a term’s meaning and context depend upon its location in the classification schedules). It is often necessary to read such sentences several times before they can be understood, and even then, one may not be certain that full comprehension has occurred’’ (Spiteri, 1998). 3 Fugmann (1993, p. 176): ‘‘[The analytico-synthetic classification] is one in which: – In the first step the analysis is performed which yields the constituent, monocategorial components and – in the second step, the synthetical one, these components are brought into a predictable sequence in order to display the particular kind of syntactical relation in which they are encountered in a document or in a search. In several variations, this basic idea has proven extremely useful in computerized information systems of the faceted type, too’’. 4 Broughton (2007) also found that molecular modeling provides a useful modern equivalent to Ranganathan’s Meccano analogy....
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...They cannot therefore be enumerated here and now; nor can they be anticipated, their filiations can be determined only after they appear’’ (Ranganathan, 1951)....
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