Lumps and Splits

An article in National Geographic calls Carolus Linnaeus an Information Architect.  While attempting to achieve the goal of naming and classifying every plant and animal on earth, Linnaeus created vast amounts of information that previously did not exist in any form that could be learned.  He also found a way to organize that information so that others could learn to identify plants and animals based on his classification system.  While it's true that his system was flawed, Linnaeus created great value for future information seekers.  Linnaeus believed that there was a natural order to the grouping of plants, and that if one could discover this natural order, then one would have discovered God's own order of creation.  Flowers were Linnaeus' first foray into discovering this natural order.  Like Dewey's classification system, even though flawed, it has stood the test of time and continues to provide value today.  Linnaeus not only created new information, but he also made it accessible with his classification system.

 Ranganathan was a brilliant man, ahead of his time when it came to the classification of information.  His Colon Classification System seems astounding to me, given the era in which he lived.  His system was an attempt to create a faceted system before computers existed.  He believed that just classifying a book in a single category, as the Dewey Decimal System does, was "intellectual laziness" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._R._Ranganathan).  One look at a Colon Classification example will tell you that it is a complex system better designed for information retrieval with computers than with paper.  Ranganathan's system clearly was a reflection of his Five Laws, most especially "Save the Time of the Reader." A single classification can provide five access points to a single body of work, thus making the job of information retrieval easier for the information seeker.  Ranganathan has a fascinating story, and his Five Laws are principles that librarians live by the world over.