Celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the death of S.R. Ranganathan (1892-1972)
The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan (9 August 1892, Shiyali, Madras, India- 27 September 1972, Bangalore, Mysore), an Indian librarian and scholar, unanimously considered the father of Indian librarianship and known worldwide for his groundbreaking five laws of librarianship and profoundly innovative theories in the field of bibliographic classifications.
Initiatives to remember him are being organised mainly in his motherland (such as the celebration in India of the Librarian's Day dedicated to him from 27 September 2021 to 27 September 2022), while occasions in Europe and other continents are very rare indeed. To celebrate the famous librarian, the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage (Cremona) of the University of Pavia is organising two separate initiatives: in collaboration with prof. Lucia Sardo (University of Bologna, Italy) and prof. Ignacio Mancini (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina) an international conference and, in collaboration with the SpazioMythos theatre company of Cremona, a performance that will stage the salient features of the great librarian's librarianship by means of a few excerpts from his own texts.
The international conference, in a mixed mode of presence at the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage and at a distance, aims to bring out and deepen the lesser known themes of Ranganathan thought. In fact, apart from being the author of the five laws and the creator of a new type of classification for which he is universally known, Ranganathan actually delved into all possible fields of study of library science, thanks to the publication of more than 50 monographs and 1500 articles in which he deals with many other disciplinary topics, such as the disciplinary position of library science, library management, national library system, his long journey in European and American libraries, school library, library acquisitions, the material aspects of books (physical bibliography), documentation, etc.
The conference will involve Italian and foreign experts in individual themes, who will propose an in-depth reading of specific original texts by Ranganathan with the dual aim of highlighting the topical aspects and comparing his thought with that of other 'classical' authors who have tackled that theme.
The idea for the play came from excerpts from Ranganathan's Reference Service, in which the author describes, for educational and didactic purposes, real episodes of dialogues and interactions between readers and librarians in the library. The success of a previous 'acted reading' carried out by a group of librarians from the Friuli Venezia Giulia section of the AIB at the University of Udine in 2011 and the strength and freshness of the Indian librarian's work, suggested a new re-elaboration of the texts for the stage by Enrico Tomasoni, which will be performed on the evening of the same day dedicated to the conference.
