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R. S. RANGANATHAN’S FIVE LAWS OF LIBRARY SCIENCE (1931)

1. Books are for use.

2. Every person his or her book.

3. Every book its reader.

4. Save the time of the reader.

5. Library is a growing organism.


SADIA PINEDA HAMEED’S APPENDICES TO R. S. RANGANATHAN’S FIVE LAWS OF LIBRARY SCIENCE (1931):
CONCERNING THE ARTIST RESOURCE LIBRARY

Contents of appendix

A. The library is not neutral...

B. Resources should not be without their own source...

C. Archives spawn from internal territory...

D. The library is external territory. This does not mean it is an exteriorisation of internal territory...

E. The archive is a system of statements…

F. An arts space must make space for knowledges...


A i. The library is not neutral.

A ii. This is a neutral statement.

A iii. It is okay to not be neutral. It is not okay to be neutral.

A iv. "Any claim to such neutrality is illusory; there is no neutral ground on which to stand anywhere in the world. Rather than bemoan that fact, I believe we should embrace it and acknowledge that it is the source of intellectual, political, and moral struggle and progress. If we take seriously this claim, then all people, no matter what their position, would have to articulate and defend the values and assumptions on which their claims are made. The other option is intellectual stagnation and political decline."

A v. Not being neutral can both right the wrongs in the archive and write the wrongs into the archives. Blanke writes that "without a clear and vital set of philosophical and political ideals acting as a guiding beacon, the library profession will not remain neutral, but will drift aimlessly with the currents of power and privilege".

B i. Resources should not be without their own source.

B ii. Example: An artist book by John Walter cannot exist in a collection without books on the art forms he appropriates; if it is going to exist in a collection at all. Blue Book should not exist in a collection at all if the library is to be a shared external territory (see appendix D).

B iii. Converse example: A book on Basquiat can exist in a collection without a book on Warhol. It would benefit from this existence.

B iv. Prioritise books on the art forms appropriated by the West over books on the appropriator. It will provide purer knowledge, and comfort.


C i. Archives spawn from internal territory.

C ii. Internal territory: what we know from where we have tread, in the least rational sense.

C iii. How well do you know your internal territory?


D i. The library is external territory. This does not mean it is an exteriorisation of internal territory.

D ii. External territory: rationalist space, to be filled however we choose.

D iii. The library (space, external territory) made to house archives (subjective, internal territory) is transformative and therefore not an exteriorisation. The knowledges within an archive are rationalised by the library. The knowledges are limited. Rationalisation dissapates their energies, histories, truths. Rasheed Araeen finds that "the effect can be illustrated by the experience of a Pakistani artist who was a postgraduate student at the Slade School of Art (University College) in 1956. At that time Professor Ernst Gombrich taught art history there, based on his famous book, The Story of Art. He came to a chapter on Islamic art and finished the whole thing in five minutes. His summary dismissal of al- most one thousand years of Islamic art had such a shattering effect on Anwar Jalal Shemza, who still lives in Britain, that he went home and destroyed all his work. (Shemza is one of the founders of the modern art movement in Pakistan.)"


E i. The archive is a system of statements.

E ii. “As Foucault provocatively warned, the archive is neither the sum of all texts that a culture preserves nor those institutions that allow for that record’s preservation. The archive is rather that “system of statements,” those “rules of practice,” that shape the specific regularities of what can and cannot be said.”

E iii. The degree to which a library can escape this system, or the amount of a library’s willingness to escape this system, is the measure of its value as a resource…

E iv. Archives are a way of protecting our intuitive knowledges; the rationalising into words, language, text, books, tangible things. But they are a last resort. Archives are forced rules of practice when there is no allowance to live, share, and experience our knowledges. Knowledges of dance, poetry, craft, telepathy, care, oneness, plants are in desperate times; they are desperate to not be destroyed/erased; they will reside in an archive as a stale academic book or appropriated artist pamphlet, only saying what they are allowed to say, stifling their own energy, because they are desperate to keep existing.


F i. An arts space must make space for knowledges.

F ii. "If history seems to escape me it is not because I do not make it; it is because the other is making it aswell."

F iii. ‘They might run under the heading ‘art’, but this culturization does not prevent them from operating as normal. … [with] real socio-political energy, not awe-inspiring symbolism.

F iv. Foucault believed that “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” To make space for intuitive knowledges, power must be dismantled, challenged, shifted.

F v. "It is a mere truism that institutions are a composite of the attitudes, habits, skills and career aspiration of the individuals who function hierarchically within them. It is also a truism that institutions tend to reform, for better or worse, from within. No doubt they are subject to change by exogenous pressures – hard knocks from the outside – but, like the civil service, that supreme model of all institutions, they seem to aim principally at their own conservative longevity, and they change 'not so you'd notice'." So what is to be done?

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