Dr. S. R. Ranganathan on 'Documentation' and DRTC

One of the earliest notes on 'documentation' by Dr. S.R.Ranganathan (SRR) was in a piece that he wrote on National Central Library: Development of Information Bureau, published in The Hindu Weekly Magazine, 1932 October 4. His scholarly writings on the subject began in the latter half of the 1940s: For example: "Classification and international documentation", Rev. Doc. v. 14 (1947); p. 154- 177; "Wider aspects of collaboration," Aslib Proc. v.l (1949); p. 127; "Documentation," Libri, 1 (1951); p. 257-288. He contributed over a hundred papers on various aspects of the subject since then especially on what we now call 'knowledge organization* and on documentation support for productivity in scientific and scholarly research and in industries. Documentation and its facets: being a symposium of seventy papers by thirty-two authors (Edited by S:R. Ranganathan; Delhi: Asia Pub. House) appeared in 1963, soon after the establishment of the Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC) as a division of the Indian Statistical Institute, in Bangalore. His last book on 'documentation'- Documentation: genesis and development (Delhi: Vikas) was published in 1973. SRR is known the world over as the 'Father of Library Movement in India' and as a pioneer in formulating the 'laws of library science.' His contributions to the theory and practice of subject classification and subject indexing, both based on the principles of subject analysis and synthesis, are found to be applicable to knowledge organization in the digital environment as well.