CANONS FOR ARRAYS

CANONS FOR CLASSIFICATION S.R.Ranganathan, the father of Library science has developed the canons for classification which are helpful for both the classificationists and classifiers. There are many canons. The following are the canons for arrays of classes. CANONS FOR ARRAY Four canons: Each array of classes in a scheme for classification should satisfy the following four canons: 1. Canon of exhaustiveness. 2. Canon of exclusiveness. 3. Canon of helpful sequence. 4. Canon of consistent sequence. 1. Canon of exhaustiveness: The classes in an array of classes, and the ranked isolates in an array of ranked isolates should be totally exhaustive of their respective common immediate universes. Any new entity added to the original universe should be assigned in the process of classification to the immediate universe under consideration and should be assigned to any of the existing classes or to a newly formed class, as the case may be, in the array under consideration. 2. Canon of exclusiveness: The classes in an array of classes and the ranked isolates in an array of ranked isolates should be mutually exclusive. According to this canon, no entity comprised in the immediate universe can belong more than one class of the array. In other words, no two classes of the array can overlap or have an entity in common. To secure this, the classes of an array should be derived from its derived from its immediate universe on the basis of one and only one characteristic. 3. Canon of Helpful Sequence: The sequence of the classes in an array of classes, and of the ranked isolates in an array of ranked isolates, should be helpful to the purpose of those for whom it is intended. This canon should be observed not only in each array but also in any coalesced array. 4. Canon of consistent sequence: Whenever similar classes or ranked isolates occur in different arrays, their sequence should be parallel in all such arrays, wherever insistence on such a parallelism does not run counter to other more important requirements. Conformity to this canon will be conductive to economy of time and of attention and of mental energy. It will minimize the load on the memory both for the classifier and the user. It is responsible for certain practices and devices and in some of the schemes for classification.