Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Ranganathan & Open Access

Continuing to explore the link between SRR and "open access" I thought I should check and see for myself the context in which he used the term - was it really in the context of open stacks as I believed the LIS forum discussion on this topic to have ended? Alas, I don't have a copy of the book at hand, but here's what I've been able to confirm. The phrase "open access" occurs in the index of S.R. Ranganathan's book Five Laws of Library Science - you can check it yourself courtesy of Amazon.

It looks like SRR discusses open access in the context of four of the five laws - first, third, fourth and fifth. Other references about open access include: (open access and) Reference service, Disservice to, Economics of, In Sweden, Safeguards in. Open stacks doesn't appear in the index although stack architecture and stack-room do. I wonder if somebody who has access to the paper copy of the original edition or the expanded edition can clarify for us?

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