Reflections on Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science
Richard A. Leiter · 2003
Professor Leiter reminds readers of the first principles of librarianship as enunciated by S.R. Ranganathan, the great Indian library theorist, and explores their meaning for law libraries in the digital age. ¶1 This article is adapted from a column that I wrote for Legal Assistant Today in 1996. 1 The column’s audience was legal assistants, some of whom, I discovered over my seven years as a columnist for the publication, had responsibility for managing law firm libraries or library resources in addition to their other duties. So from time to time my column drifted into advice about managing libraries. This particular column came about at a time when I was mentoring some younger librarians and discovered to my surprise that they did not know of Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science. 2 When I expressed concern about this to professional colleagues, I was even more surprised to find that many of them hadn’t heard of or couldn’t remember the great Indian library theorist’s five laws either. ¶2 I have returned to the subject for several reasons. First, at the time I wrote the original column, I also wanted to share my thoughts on the five laws with my