QUESTION
Who categorized information sources into conventional, neo-conventional, non-conventional, and meta-documents?
OPTIONS
(a) Bradford
(b) Ranganathan
(c) Hanson
(d) Grogan
ANSWER
(b) Ranganathan
Dr. S. R. Ranganathan categorized/classified documentary sources of information into Conventional, Neo-conventional, Non-conventional, and Meta documents.
Based on the "physical characteristics" of documents S. R. Ranganathan classified documentary sources of information into four categories. These also reflect the chronological order of their development. They are:
Conventional documents: Examples: books, periodicals, maps, atlases, etc. In Conventional documents, the thought content is recorded in a natural language by means of writing, typing, printing, or by some near-printing process. These are the most popular documents in use.
Neo-conventional documents: Examples: standards, specifications, data and the like, etc. Neo-conventional documents are a new class of micro-document, such as standards, specifications, patents, data of properties in natural sciences and their applications, reaction formulae in chemistry, differential clinical data in medicine, and press cuttings of current opinion and news in the field of social sciences, etc.
Non-conventional documents: Examples: microcopy, audio, visual, and audio-visual documents, etc. Micro reproduction of "Conventional documents," Non-conventional documents are a record in non-conventional size, shape, or material.
Meta-documents: Record of national or social phenomenon got through instrumental and mechanical devices--unmitigated by the human brain. A meta-document is an instrument record of natural and social phenomena made directly unmediated by the human mind even before it got transformed into thought and got into the human mind. Instrument technology, photography, radar, and various other elements have made such instrument-record of natural and social phenomena possible.
Ranganathan's classification groups documents in the chronological order of their development and does not take into consideration the "information characteristics" of a document. He does not make any difference between an ordinary periodical and an indexing periodical. Also, a book and a periodical belong to the same category according to him.
