Inverting the “Principle of inversion”

摘要

Fifty years ago, I had the great good fortune to be at library school, in Ealing Technical College (now the University of the Thames Valley), and to learn from two inspiring cataloguing teachers—Eric Stone and Alan Thomas. I had gone to library school with the intention of becoming a public library reference librarian (after working as a junior assistant in Hampstead and Ealing Public Libraries), but exposure to the ideas and literature of cataloguing and classification guided by Mr Thomas and Mr Stone changed that rapidly and determined the course of my working life. The two luminaries whose work inspired me most were the cataloguing genius Seymour Lubetzky and the classificationist S.R. Ranganathan. The latter—the greatest librarian of the 20th century—loomed large in library education and the library profession in those days. As things turned out, my post-library-school work was in the field of descriptive cataloguing and I had the honour of knowing and corresponding with Mr Lubetzky on many occasions up to the end of his long life. The teachings and inspiration of Dr Ranganathan remained with me nevertheless. My first job after library school was a research project for the British National Bibliography (BNB) and the North-Western Polytechnic library school, following which I was the employed by BNB. The presiding genius of BNB was A.J. “Jack” Wells, a friend and disciple of Dr Ranganathan’s. Thus, though I worked on the descriptive cataloguing side of that enterprise, I worked in an institution suffused with Dr Ranganathan’s ideas and inspired by his ideals.