BARBARA KYLE AND THE CLASSIFICATION OF SOCIOLOGY
| Pages | 271-274 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026377 |
| Published date | 01 April 1965 |
| Date | 01 April 1965 |
| Author | S.R. RANGANATHAN |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
BARBARA KYLE AND THE
CLASSIFICATION OF SOCIOLOGY
S. R. RANGANATHAN
National
Research Professor
in Library
Science,
Bangalore
I. BARBARA KYLE
BARBARA KYLE is a respected member of the library profession. It is
sad to know that
she has
resigned her place in Aslib work.
She is
too young
and too able to be lost to library science. We look forward to seeing her
health restored and her work resumed. Our first meeting was in 1948, in
Chatham House. The huge work of newspaper clippings being done there
impressed me as a
first-class
piece of documentation work in the field of
social
sciences.
Our next meeting was at Geneva in 1955 at a meeting of the
Committee on the International Organization of Documentation Work
in Social Sciences. There her dynamism could be seen in its fullness. In
May 1957, she presided over my talk on Classification as
a
Discipline at the
Dorking Conference. These were all formal
occasions.
We had
a
more inti-
mate talk
later,
when we happened to ride by chance on the same bus down
New Oxford Street in London.
2.
VALUE OF A FRIEND'S CRITICISM
In 1958, Barbara Kyle sent me a draft paper intended for the Washington
Conference. It
was a
remarkable example of how it
is
possible in intellectual
friendship to put in the same letter both the warmest appreciation of the
value of a piece of work and at the same time give an unsparing criticism.
One truly flourishes more on the latter than on the former. For, whatever
is
achieved
is
but
a step
towards achieving something
more.
This 'something
more' cannot be seized unless
a
competent friend points out the
flaws
as
seen
from his angle. Barbara Kyle also attaches a similar value to the frank and
unreserved opinion of her peers on her own work. Accordingly, I wrote to
her an unsparing criticism on each point in her draft paper. I regard such an
exchange of ideas
as
one of the most useful
I
have had in helping our mutual
development in our common subject-field.
271
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