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Public Library Quarterly, 29:64–77, 2010Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0161-6846 print/1541-1540 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01616840903563024

WPLQ0161-68461541-1540Public Library Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1, Jan 2010: pp. 0–0Public Library Quarterly

Saving Time: Ranganathan and the Librarian as Teacher

Saving Time: Ranganathan and the Librarian as TeacherG. Holt

GLEN HOLTEditor, Public Library Quarterly

In the modern world, time has become a precious commodity.Human beings are time bound and therefore time conscious. S. R.Ranganathan recognized that helping constituents save time wasthe most valuable gift that libraries could give them, such that hisonly service command law (i.e., the Fourth Law) is that librariesmust “Save the time of the User.” Library dependence on computershas increased users’ belief that librarians should be able to helpthem save time. The extent of that expectation can be seen in theway that users involve libraries in their efforts to “satisfice” theirresearch including materials browsing. These expectations abouttime mean that users bring high expectations when they interactwith librarians. They expect librarians to be expert in many fields.Implicit in those expectations is that librarians know how to sharetheir knowledge through appropriate instruction, suggesting anincreased role for public librarians as teachers.

KEYWORDS Ranganathan’s Fourth Law, time saving, savingtime, “satisficing,” public librarian as teacher, instruction in thepublic library

We who have a stake in the future of libraries need to think a lot abouttime—not as an abstraction but as a specific issue in the lives of those whouse or want to use library services. Saving time for users is a frequentlycited reason for why users value libraries. Saving time is one good way to

Portions of this article appeared as “The Value of Time,” and “How Librarians SaveTime,” Library Leadership Network Commons, January 5 and January 13, 2006.

Address correspondence to Glen Holt, 4954 Lindell Boulevard, Apartment 4W, St. Louis,MO 63108. E-mail: glenholt@sbcglobal.net

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Saving Time: Ranganathan and the Librarian as Teacher 65

make libraries essential. And, making libraries essential builds public sup-port for them among the taxpayers and civic officials who pay the bills.

HUMANS GRASP A SENSE OF TIME

The basis for humans and expressions of time can be found in JeremyRifkin’s Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History (1987). Rifkindemonstrates that humankind is a “time-binding animal. . . . All of our per-ceptions of self and world are mediated by the way we imagine, explain,use and implement time.” We think backwards in time to create “history,” auseable past with which we reference our present. And, we draw on bothfuture and past to think forward to imagine a future. Indeed, as Rifkin main-tains, we are time bound (p. 9). Intriguingly, Rifkin in 1987 predicted thenew “politics of time,” in which many individuals and groups would set outto resist the “time tyranny” of digital watches, cell phones and computers sothey could live more “natural lives” in family participation, social engage-ment and interests in arts and crafts.1

A few years earlier, the eminent economic historian, David S. Landes,used his brilliant reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution to help framehis book, Revolution in Time (1983). In that volume, Landes pointed outhow clocks becoming the principal tool in organizing modernity. Clocksbegan in China in the 11th century, under sanction of the emperor and as atool of control. Landes concludes his recounting of the history of clockswith the motto of the U.S.-based National Association of Watch and ClockCollectors: Tempus vitam regit, “Time rules life” (p. 360).

The importance of time and clocks in the US industrial revolution istold by Tamara K. Hareven in her book, Family Time & Industrial Time(1982), which centers on the conflict between families and their employerin the largest textile mill in New Hampshire. Hareven’s major point is not allfamilies gave up “family time” for “industrial time” but self-consciously usedtheir “family time” for work to sustain the family and to make extra moneyto get ahead. They also used family time for pleasurable activities—tavern,church, social club, and the like. Family time, Hareven says, was a powerfulcounterforce against factory work in poorer working families. This workreminds us that the poor, like the rich, make self-conscious decisions abouthow they use their time.

RANGANATHAN AND SAVING THE TIME OF THE READER

The great library writer, S. R. Ranganathan, in his wonderfully readable 1931book, wrote that the fourth law of library science was to “Save the time ofthe user.”

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Ranganathan, of course, had five laws:

1. Books are for use2. Every reader his [or her] book3. Every book its reader4. Save the time of the User5. The library is a growing organism

The first three of these laws center on the singular relationship between abook and a reader. They are philosophical—concerning the nature of peopleand things (books). The fifth is about the organic nature of library growth; itaddresses change. Ranganathan recognizes that library growth, like growthin nature, may be episodic or periodic. In his chapter discussing the fifthlaw, it is clear that Ranganathan wants to treat the library as a unity. In sim-plest terms, Ranganathan is suggesting that a library is more than the sum ofits parts.

The fourth law is different from the others; it is a service command, animperative, an essential action that libraries need to take. It is this fourthlaw, the command law, that is the centerpiece of this article.

Like all of us who write, Ranganathan’s context was his times and hisexperiences in those times. Good scholar that he was, he formulated hisideas in a major colonial tributary of Great Britain, drew upon the literatureof his time and library history as he understood it to devise his laws.

Even more, however, he drew upon his experience as a library admin-istrator in a nation underserved by libraries or schools, in institutions lackingprofessional librarians and besieged by layers of bureaucracy that burnedout people and used up resources with little evidence of maximizing results.The brilliance of Ranganathan is his ability to synthesize generalizationsgrowing out of the experiences of having observed and read about his spe-cialty as an applied researcher. Had he been writing today even in similarcircumstances, he would have generalized differently because the librarylandscape is so different from the one that served as his context.

Ranganathan knew implicitly that literacy and knowledge—bothcontained primarily in books in what was then a book-short and library-short nation—were the keys to individual and family improvement and tonational economic development. Of course, librarians had to “Save the timeof the user.” If librarians were inefficient and ineffective in getting the rightbook to the person who needed it, they were committing no less a sinthan delaying the economic and social development of their independentnation-state.

In our time as in Ranganathan’s colonial situation, one of our most dis-respectful professional behaviors occurs when we “waste the time of theuser.” For the poor and the weak in our society, whether they are befuddledfreshmen, poor ghetto mothers, homeless men, or devoted scholars seeking

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sources of new insight, the most precious commodity they have is theirtime. When librarians do not “save time” for their users, they belittle theirusers’ value as human beings, as persons who can learn, as valuable indi-viduals who will use their excitement about learning, their brains and theirwill to improve themselves, their families, their communities, and theirnation.

RANGANATHAN’S PRACTICAL ADVICE FOR SAVING THE TIME OF THE USER

In the following paragraphs, I discuss how Ranganathan saw librariansworking to “Save the time of the user.” By intent, I have presented severalquotes from S. R. Ranganathan’s book, The Five Laws of Library Science(1931). To ensure that we are all talking about the same book, we can usethe identifiers that a typical reader might use to identify the edition (i.e., it isthe one with the blue cover with the gold illustration and the words, “To beliterate is to possess the cow of plenty”).

My editing of these quotes has been for clarity and brevity. I haveincluded page references after the quotations so that others may matchthem against my interpretations.

Open Access Rather Than Closed Stacks

Writing as a government official who had dealt with both Indian and Britishlibrary bureaucrats, Ranganathan was offended by the time wasted in the oldlibrary with its massive and often numerous volumes of catalog entries and thenecessity for errorless writing of call slips and for errorless finding by stackclerks. Ranganathan uses emotional words to describe the inefficient library, thewasted time in returned slips, books not found and long user waits. He con-cluded that such time abuses “make the selection of books a heart-break and alabour tinctured with [user] disgust” (pp. 339–40). He noted:

The Fourth Law would insist that, in deciding large questions of policy,such as open access vs. [a] ‘closed’ system, the spirit of the modernmethod of cost-accounting should be adopted. . . . The claims of theopen access system, already advocated by the Second and the ThirdLaws [i.e., Books are for use and Every book its reader], are . . . reinforcedby the Fourth Law, on grounds of national economy. (pp. 340, 342)

In the United States, where open stacks predominate, we reap the benefits ofRanganathan’s logic. We see the benefits even more clearly when we expe-rience the antithesis by working in a closed-stack library with its multiplecatalogs, call slips, indexes and shelving schemes; and, for those “lucky”

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enough to obtain stack passes, finding and then learning our way throughmazes of storage rooms, multiple generations of shelving bays and boxes ofmaterials that will “some day” be cataloged. Whenever possible, most libraries,large and small, should save the time of the reader through open stack access.

Access Takes Precedence Over Security

Ranganathan writes only a single sentence on this issue but his preferenceis clear. He notes: “An alarmist attitude should not be developed by isolat-ing the probable or actual loss of a few volumes in a year or by taking anyother partial view of the matter [of theft]” (p. 340).

For those who doubt my interpretation of the author’s preference, readthe story in his Chapter 1 about the librarian who created such a securelibrary that he let no one use it, then wondered why the citizens of his towndid not support his high-purposed effort of increasing literacy.

The brevity of this subject, I suspect, is Ranganathan’s way of dealingwith the enigmatic attitudes about library security and library crime held bylibrary professionals in his time—and in our own. In the same issue of PLQwhere this article appears, a profoundly knowledgeable library observer,Charles Martell, does an important service by discussing the theft of popularmaterials from the Sacramento Public Library. Library security always is amatter of balance and working with available resources, including thepolice and the courts, to use the tools available to us. Ranganathan was sim-ply adamant about the need for open access stacks. Period.

Shelving Arrangement by User Priority

Ranganathan recognized the complexity of materials shelving issues, butagain he tried to handle it by a principle. “The class of books that is most indemand should be put on the nearest shelves of the stack-room and theclass that is least popular should, ordinarily, be put at the farthest end”(p. 344). Moreover, “the books of ready reference such as directories, year-books, dictionaries and encyclopaedias [sic] should be placed as close to the[reference] counter as possible so that no time need be wasted by staff andreaders in getting at them (p. 345).

Ranganathan’s shelving principles are the right ones. He wants collec-tions grouped by user interest with related collections in closest possibleproximity. Like all good librarians, however, he realizes that shelving schemesare influenced by all sorts of factors, some (like closeness to the door) arerelative while others (like total shelf length in a room or numerical size of acollection) are cold space-planning statistics. Ranganathan’s “histogram” anda shelf map in his book show the compromises that he made in shelvingarrangements in his own research-oriented library.

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Library shelving arrangements are only as relevant as their match to theneeds and wants of the users. Every shelf scheme is a compromise, whether thechoices are obvious or not to those trying to find something on the shelves.Ranganathan, however, was attempting already in the 1920s and 1930s to orga-nize the customer-focused library. When librarians shelve materials to focus oncustomer wants and interests, they are saving the time of the user.

Librarian-Prepared Finding Aids

In the words of our time, Ranganathan recognized librarians as “knowledgeworkers” and “administrators” whose principal tasks were intellectual andorganizational. These claims can be seen in the way that the Indian librarianhandled the issues of all kinds of intellectual tools that would help userssave time. Here are two of them:

1. Guides to the stack room. In libraries of any size, Ranganathan wrote, theresearcher “will be naturally bewildered by the array of books withwhich he is surrounded and may have to waste much time before arriv-ing at the shelves containing the class of books required by him. To savethe time of the reader at this stage, the library should provide an efficientsystem of guides [i.e. signs] in the stack-room” (p. 346).

2. Shelf labeling. “With the aid of the signal guides greeting him at the endof each gangway, he [i.e. the researcher] will easily enter that particulargangway which contains the subject in which he is interested” (p. 348).Ranganathan discusses several other types of finding aids as well.

In modern terms, Ranganathan recognized that librarians manage storagedepositories that stock “composite” books and magazines that contain differentcategories of knowledge. Good stack and shelf signage is always a sign of awell-run library. Wayfinding in libraries is always problematical. Ranganathanwould always encourage us to devise wayfinding mechanisms that will make iteasier for our constituents to find what they want in our libraries.

Cross reference guides. In discussing the topic of cross references, spe-cifically the time of librarians in the creation of these entries, Ranganathanreiterated his argument of how libraries contributed to the national interest.Writing about what he described as “the economic aspect of the cross-referencing work,” the librarian-mathematician noted,

Analytic cross-reference cards can be prepared only if the library has anadequate technical staff with high academic qualifications and thoroughprofessional training. It has been found from four years’ experience thata full-timed staff of five is necessary to deal with the annual accessionsof a library, adding 6,000 volumes a year and that a volume requires sixcards on an average. (p. 354)

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This analysis is one of many discussions in the book about what specificlibrary operations cost.

Staff Training and Knowledge: “Reference Work” as Opposed to “Ready Reference Work

A researcher himself, Ranganathan believed that all libraries had to have well-trained reference staff who knew how to organize the knowledge they gained asthey worked with their collections. The modern large library with its thousandsof books and even more thousands of cross reference cards and files were likelyto overwhelm even a knowledgeable professor or other research scholar.

Because of that complexity, librarians, in our modern terms, had toconduct “reference interviews,” the intention being to match the interestand level of knowledge of the user with the collections at hand and,through use of printed catalogs from other still-larger or more specializedlibraries, make recommendations on other places the researcher could visitprofitably. Ranganathan wrote,

Being put at ease [by the reference librarian], the reader will state hisproblems and his requirements as definitely as he can. The reference-librarian will unreservedly place at his disposal his varied bibliographicalexperience, built up by years of contact with several specialists seekinghis help and by the constant handling of the tools and the resources ofthe library from various points of view. This will SAVE THE TIME OFTHE READER considerably and enable him to get at his materials farmore expeditiously than otherwise. (p. 262)

No part of library work was more valuable than reference work thatsaved time for those “best minds” engaged in research. In modern parlance,Ranganathan reminded readers that such value did not come without formaltraining and the time necessary for librarians to become knowledgeableabout the materials they watched over. It was clearly recognized that sucheducation and training did not come without costs.

Save the Time of the Reader: The National Interest

Without the kind of modern library organization he had outlined in this andprevious chapters, those who sought information would find theirtime “wasted in going through [i.e. repeating] the same process of search”(p. 354). This would mean repeated wastage not only of the nation’s moneybut also of its best brains. Research should not be allowed to degenerateinto a search of this type” (p. 354).

The reason was pure nationalism. “All the countries of the world are reallycompetitors in matters of research; and the workers in any branch of research

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Saving Time: Ranganathan and the Librarian as Teacher 71

in our country should not be subjected to avoidable handicaps,” Ranganathanwrote. “Their precious time should be saved as much as possible by thelibraries undertaking to do thorough cross-referencing work.” (pp. 354-55).

“Similarly, consider the national wastage that would be involved in pro-fessor after professor and student after student—and that from year toyear—pulling out book after book from the large literature collection of thelibrary to make out an exhaustive list of its resources on [any importanttopic]. . . . Is it an economical way of utilizing the brain power and time oferudite professors and students?” The Fourth Law would ask, “Is it not moreeconomical from the national point of view, to introduce a division oflabour here by setting apart a few persons to prepare such exhaustive listsin all possible subjects [i.e., organization by subject heading]?” Such workonce done will be of use for ever” (pp. 354–55). Ranganathan suggested thatthe same specialized cross referencing needed to be done on periodicals aswell for the same reasons.

“It would be more economical, from the point of view of the commu-nity as a whole, to get it done by a special staff and make it available to allresearchers. The Fourth Law would in fact go to the extent of lifting it, notonly from the sphere of individual workers, but also from that of individuallibraries and even of individual nations and would assign it to internationalorganizations [sic].” (p. 356).

In sum, library collaboration to open up access to knowledge was inthe national interest. The American way of “all local, all the time (or certainlymost of the time)” was not an efficient way to reach a bright economicfuture for any nation.

Then, Ranganathan presented his wrap-up argument for saving time.The librarian’s ability to bring order from the chaotic state of piles of booksand books on many subjects stacked or shelved as they came in the doorwas what—to use a modern term—“added value” to the nation and to theworld of knowledge. Ranganathan wrote,

The librarian’s intimate acquaintance with classification and cataloguinggives him an immense advantage over the reader in arriving quickly at thedesired book or information. He knows the order in which the books fall.He knows the ins and outs of his catalogue. He can wield all kinds ofindexes and catalogues with greater ease and speed. Hence the FourthLaw also would join hands with the first three Laws in pressing the needfor an adequate Reference Staff in all libraries. The money spent on such astaff comes back to the nation in ever-increasing measure in the saving ofthe precious time of its best brains. That this is an economically soundproposition can be inferred from the fact that commercial and businesslibraries, maintained by business houses ungrudgingly pay for an adequateReference Staff. They know the economic value of time. But academiclibraries seem to be lacking in their power to perceive the value of timeand are hence halting in appreciating the need for such a staff. (p. 360)

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Through his discussion of saving reader time, Ranganathan implicitly, andby example, defines the elements of customer-centered library services thatresult in time savings. The correct way to apply this law is to study the waycustomers use the library. He suggests the need to focus on what today we call“shopping pathways,” “time and cost studies” of services processes, andmaterials management studies to achieve efficiency in storage and access. Suchcustomer-centered studies resulted in time saving for library users. Were headvocating today, Ranganathan would have found professional collaboration,cooperation, cataloging and abstracting efforts like WorldCat, MedLine,WestLaw, EBSCOHost and NoveList as products that his writing envisioned.

SAVING TIME A PRE-EMINENT U.S. INTEREST

We should not let Ranganathan’s nationalistic arguments about the impor-tance of saving time get lost when we step forward to do library advocacy. Thelibrary profession advertises itself as a citadel for free speech and democracy, abastion of literacy and a pleasure palace for the popular reader. All theseclaims are based on greater or lesser truth depending on the nature of themission and work of a particular library system.

It does seem surprising that the profession has spent so little effort inbuilding its image on Ranganathan’s command to “Save the time of the user.”

If you think this an odd point in any way, let me remind you that thisnation’s citizens, particularly Frederick Winslow Taylor, author of The Prin-ciples of Scientific Management (1911) invented the modern concept of timemanagement and efficiency. And, before you disparage that fact, note thatPresident Dwight David Eisenhower pushed passage of the first nationalhighway act that funded the modern expressway system as a way to savetime as we moved troops, weapons and military supplies to strategic positionsthroughout the nation. The original rational for why there are multi-lanehighways across lightly populated states like Montana and Wyoming is thenational military need to connect defensive positions, including missilesites, air bases and military forts.

The United States is a nation that loves statistics and one that spends allsorts of money on ourselves to see “how much time we can save.” Thelibrary community, on the other hand, spends time to find out about its“inputs” and to measure its “outputs.” It has spent a lot less on trying tomeasure the value that librarians’ work has made to the nation. Just becausethe library profession is short on metrics does not mean that it should notuse the metrics it has to make the most of the practical contributions thatlibraries make to the nation.

S. R. Ranganathan loved British and U.S. library systems because hesaw them as being more time and money efficient that other libraries in theworld. Writing about the open access shelving system, he noted:

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Saving Time: Ranganathan and the Librarian as Teacher 73

“In modern communities, such as those of America and England forwhom time is money and money is time, the slogan of the Fourth Law—SAVE THE TIME OF THE READER—seems to have produced a profoundimpression. Further, the recent tendencies in the evolution of businessmethods [in these nations] and the rapid diffusion of the ‘cost-accounting’consciousness not only among the leaders but even among the masses haveled those communities to conclude that the balance of advantage is decid-edly in favour [sic] of the open access system. In this system, the wastagedue to waiting at the counter is eliminated fully and the wastage due towading through cumbrous catalogues is reduced to a minimum and mayeven be altogether unnecessary for many ordinary readers” (pp. 341-42).

Here, in Ranganathan’s 1931 book is the library profession’s rationalefor improved local, regional and even national funding of its work. Like it ornot, there is almost nothing in this country more important than saving time.No other profession has organized itself as a national work force for savingtime, and no profession that works to save people’s time has spent so littleof its own resources telling the public, funders and government officialsabout those savings.

We have lost the importance of this thread in our work—and as a pro-fession we certainly have done an ineffective job of telling our users,donors and government officials about how we save the time of the reader.“Saving Time” should be the opening mantra in our public rationale state-ments. It is a practical reason that our users understand and thank us for. Itis a rationale that our non-users and even those who decide not to fund uswill have to deal. To phrase the argument, if you don’t fund well-run librar-ies, you waste people’s time. Is there a more powerful and more legitimateargument for funding great libraries than this one?

SAVING TIME, SATISFICING AND THE LIBRARIAN AS EXPERT AND TEACHER

In contemporary life, the use of time—and the “saving of time”—are pro-found subjects.

In a nation that wants even its smallest personal idiosyncrasy to have aname, multitasking (which is trying to save time) has become the biggestattributed reason for accidents. One does not say, for example, “I wasn’tpaying attention,” or “I was in a hurry to get to my girlfriend’s house.”Instead one says, “I was dialing a number on my cell phone,” or “I wastexting.” According to the National Safety Commission, multitasking—a formof distraction—is a major cause of auto accidents. So significant is multitask-ing in the national psyche that even when individuals know their behavioris being recorded while driving, they continue to practice multitasking tosave time.2

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A sense of saving time is related to how individuals use the Internet.Author Christian Crumlish captures the relationship in his volume, The Internetfor Busy People which is subtitled The Book to Use When There’s No Time toLose – Computer Fundamentals for Complicated Lives (1996). Some of theheadings in the volume reveal its emphasis. The titles include, “Fast Forwards,”“Shortcuts,” Timesaving Tips,” “Fast and clever ways to . . . remember thejargon,” and “Pitfalls . . . to avoid to save you time and headaches.”

And, finally, there is Steve Krug’s invaluable Don’t Make Me Think: ACommon Sense Approach to Web Usability, originally published in 2000 andinto a second edition in 2006. Krug argues that Internet computer users con-sider every mouse click a waste of time unless it brings them a sense ofmoving closer toward what they want out of the computer. Krug says thatprofessionals who design web pages should stop thinking that searchersoptimize their behavior to find the “best” source. Instead, they choose “thefirst reasonable option,” thereby engaging in what an economist working inthe 1950s was the first to call “satisficing,” a cross between satisfying andsufficing. (p. 24).

In other words, Krug is advising that saving time is so important thatwe are willing to compromise desired quality. Taking computer search short-cuts, multitasking while driving and settling for “something” rather thanwhat seems “exactly right” to save a keystroke or two or reorienting a searchare examples of “satisficing.”

Librarians would do well to recognize that “satisficing” is very much thenatural order of the way families and individuals conduct their lives, includ-ing their use of the library and its Internet computers. “Satisficing” explainslots of user behavior:

• Individuals use the Internet to find a “satisficing” answer because it seemsto take less time than going to the library to get help they may need.“Time saving” is at the heart of why experienced Internet users look forinformation on the Web; “satisficing” probably is what they settle for.

• As Internet users become more skilled in searching, they perceive theyare saving time even when it takes longer to find “harder” answers. Asense of improved search skills means that researchers still believe theyare saving time even if it takes them additional time to find answers towhat they regard as harder questions. The objective reality, however, isthat when searchers “satisfice” in research areas in which they are lessfamiliar, they may tend to settle on an answer too quickly. Then savingtime results in a higher error rate.

• An example of computer satisficing: The New York Times a few monthsago reported on a nine-year-old boy named Tyler Kennedy. Tyler’s teacherassigned him the task of researching and writing a report about the platypus.Tyler went to his favorite online reference source, YouTube. Tyler soughtout YouTube because that’s where he has learned to go for sophisticated

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help in playing his Wii games and assistance in “collecting Bakugan BattleBrawlers cards, which are linked to a Japanese anime television series.”Tyler says that YouTube is his main reference tool; he follows up with aGoogle search only when he has the occasional item that he cannot findon YouTube.3 Tyler satisficed.

• “Satisficing” also raises library researcher expectations about how muchlibrarians know and how fast they can find it. Former Cleveland PublicLibrary Director Marilyn Mason pointed out this painful reality over adecade ago. When her library organized and introduced CleveNet, Masonrelated, those who used the network and other Internet sources the mostcame to even the smallest neighborhood library with high expectations ofhow helpful library staff would be. Hence, the demand: “You’re a librarian!Why don’t you know how to do ‘proximate reality’ searching?”

• Finally, “satisficing” is demonstrated in how popular readers look foranother book to read. In the words of NoveList and NextReads creatorand now EBSCO Vice President Duncan Smith, the search for anotherreading experience is not for “the ultimate read” but for “the next bestbook.” What else is this but “satisficing”? Until we know a lot moreabout it than we do, “browsing the stacks,” probably should be seen asan example of “enjoyable satisficing” rather than a more emotionallyintense and intellectually harder job of finding exactly the right book orthe right magazine.

CONCLUSION

Human beings are time bound and therefore time conscious. In the modernworld, time has become a precious commodity, and to save time peoplemultitask and “satisfice” to save time. S. R. Ranganathan recognized that sav-ing the time of the user was the most valuable gift that libraries could giveto their constituents. So important was saving the user’s time that his onlyservice command law (i.e., the Fourth Law) is that libraries must “Save thetime of the user.” Library dependence on computers have increased users’belief that librarians should be able to help them save time. The extent ofthat expectation can be seen in the way that users involve libraries in theirefforts to “satisfice” their research including materials browsing.

These expectations about time mean that users bring high expecta-tions when they interact with librarians. They expect librarians to be expertin many fields or at least expert in finding particular pieces of informa-tion in those fields. Implicit in those expectations is still another: Librari-ans need to know how to share their knowledge through appropriateinstruction.

More than a decade ago, Brenden Rapple wrote about this issue forcollege librarians:

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76 G. Holt

Some commentators argue that as more users become electronicallysophisticated and as the technology becomes more usable, traditionalreference and other liaison services between librarian and faculty/students/patrons will become well-nigh obsolete. . . . . As Fisher andBjorner (1994) state, “By and large, end-users—even thoughtful andintelligent ones—underestimate the complexity of the informationworld” (283). . . . Traditionally, reference services focused on helpingfaculty and students locate material within the four walls of the homelibrary. With the advent of the electronic library, librarians must nowteach not only these home resources, but also point to the existenceof, and means to access, the vast aggregate of global material. . . .They must help teach electronic-mail, an increasingly fundamentalsource of both academic and other information. They must point tolistservs and other online discussion lists and newsgroups . . . . AsWilliam Miller (1992) aptly remarked: “As collection building becomesless important, it seems inevitable that the notion of the teachinglibrary will become the primary one to which the profession aspires”(153). (Rapple, 1997)

Public libraries are legatee institutions: They historically have absorbedtasks that users have called upon them to undertake. In the modern world,where time is the ultimate resource, and saving time is a way to add valueto any interpersonal transaction, it seems logical to conclude that manylibrarians will be drawn into not only saving the time of users but in teach-ing them how to become more self sufficient in their research in the com-plex, internationally sourced information world. In the end, then, shouldn’twe expect more demand for librarians and teachers generally to becomeeducationally proficient in offering efficient and effective access into aworld where humankind increasingly spends its work and leisure time.

One of the attributes of a great teacher at any educational level alwayshas been to get students to learn the difference between exactly the bestsource and sufficing something that just gets by. Given that standard of edu-cational quality, it is hard to see how public librarians will not be drawntoward pedagogical training and instructional methodology as their institu-tions become ever more electronically interdependent.

CONTRIBUTOR

Glen Holt is the editor of Public Library Quarterly. He has been ateacher and administrator at Washington University in St. Louis and inthe College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Formore than a decade and a half he was CEO of the St. Louis PublicLibrary.

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Saving Time: Ranganathan and the Librarian as Teacher 77

NOTES

1. Quotes retrieved from “The Office” of Jeremy Rifkind. The Foundation for Economic Trends.http:www.foet.org/books/time-wars.html (accessed February 18, 2010).

2. A convenient source of the conclusion is at http://www.nationalsafetycommission.com/alerts/2007/10/dangers-of-multitasking.php

3. Tyler’s story is told in Miguel Helft, “At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool.” New YorkTimes Online. Posted January 18, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/business/media/18ping.html?th&emc=th (accessed January 18, 2010).

REFERENCES

Crumlish, Christian. 1996. The internet for busy people: the book to use when there’sno time to lose—computer fundamentals for complicated lives. Berkeley, CA:Osborne/Mcgraw-Hill.

Hareven, Tamara. 1982. Family time & industrial time: The relationship between thefamily and work in a New England industrial community. Cambridge, NY:Cambridge University Press.

Krug, Steven. 2000. Don’t make me think: a common sense approach to web usabil-ity. Berkeley, CA: New Riders Publishers.

Landes, David S. 1983. Revolution in time: Clocks and the making of the modernworld. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Raganathan, Shiyali R. 1931. The five laws of library science. Madras, India: TheMadras Library Association.

Rapple, Brendan A. 1997. “The librarian as teacher in the networked environment.”College Teaching, Vol. 45. http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5000525926 (accessed December 13, 2009)

Rifkin, Jeremy. 1987. Time wars: The primary conflict in human history. New York:Henry Holt.

Taylor, Frederick Winslow. 1911. The principles of scientific management. NewYork: Harper & Brothers.

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