«Rien ne manque à sa gloire; il manquait à la notre». Shera, Ranganathan and the Zero Law of Librarianship

Abstract

This paper explores the development of Ranganathan's Five laws of librarianship as presented in the 1931 edition, continuing the analysis and methodology from the previous article, The life principle of the library, published in «AIB studi», 64 (2024), n. 2. The starting point is Jesse H. Shera's concise and insightful work, S.R. Ranganathan: a study (1963), where Shera asserts that Ranganathan «took all librarianship as his province». This proposal primarily targets American librarianship, encouraging a broader perspective on other librarianship cultures, beginning with the richness of Ranganathan's contributions. The dense textuality of the Five laws intertwines two narrative levels: the texts read, indirectly quoted, or produced by Ranganathan himself, and the historical context. This paper aims to uncover a more intricate history of education between 1926 and 1930, starting with Ranganathan's Presidential Address at the “Seventh Library Conference” in Pudukottai (1926) and his contributions to educational journals from 1928 to 1931.
The paper examines four of Ranganathan's seminal works on the subject: the second edition of the Five laws (1957); his autobiography, A librarian looks back; the essay Emergence of library science (1966), published in the journal «Library science with a slant to documentation»; and the third edition (1967) of Prolegomena to library classification.