THE FIVE LAWS OF LIBRARY SCIENCE:
BOOKS ARE FOR USE
EVERY READER HIS BOOK
EVERY BOOK ITS READER
SAVE THE TIME OF THE READER
LIBRARY IS A GROWING ORGANISM
S.R. RANGANATHAN, 1931
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To augment the [American Library Association's] image, [Dewey] also devised an ALA motto while commuting by horse between his home in Newton and his office in Boston [in 1878]: "The best reading for the largest number at the least expense."
--Wayne A. Wiegand, The Politics of an Emerging Profession: The American Library Association, 1876-1917 (Westwood, CT: Greenwood, 1986), p. 23.
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Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own governours, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both.
--James Madison (quoted in Report of the Commission on Freedom and Equality of Access to Information (Chicago: American Library Association, 1986).
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Warren J. Haas, former head of the Council on Library Resources, believes that librarianship must have a definition of the profession that the public will understand. He has proposed the following:
The function of librarianship is to promote and to continuously improve the ability of individuals and society to make use of what is known, or what has been previously created
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MOOERS' LAW: An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.
--Calvin N. Mooers, Editorial, American Documentation, 11 (July 1960):ii