In the parlance of Library and Information Sciences, metadata refers to information dimensions which are created, stored and shared in order to understand the value and contextual relevance of an information resource. It is inspired from the very idea of cataloguing library resources that has been the bread and butter of librarians for centuries. With the evolution of the World Wide Web and more recently the social semantic web, the importance of metadata has acquired a new dimension specific to web information management systems. The paper attempts to be a primer of various dimensions of metadata management for students, researchers and practitioners in the domain of Library and Information Sciences. It addresses wide ranging theoretical, technical and research issues in metadata management, and concludes with a fervent appeal to take up metadata practice and research.

KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION is a forum for all those interested in the organization of knowledge on a universal or a domain-specific scale, using concept-analytical or concept-synthetical approaches, as well as quantitative and qualitative methodologies. KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION also addresses the intellectual and automatic compilation and use of classification systems and thesauri in all fields of knowledge, with special attention being given to the problems of terminology. KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION publishes original articles, reports on conferences and similar communications, as well as book reviews, letters to the editor, and an extensive annotated bibliography of recent classification and indexing literature. KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION should therefore be available at every university and research library of every country, at every information center, at colleges and schools of library and information science, in the hands of everybody interested in the fields mentioned above and thus also at every office for updating information on any topic related to the problems of order in our information-flooded times.

This study aims to explicate the mind and intellectual personality of Ranganathan through various genetic and environmental influences, both professional and social. Ranganathan’s father Ramamrita Aiyer was an erudite and religiously respected man in his village. Ranganathan grew up in a centuries old deeply practising Brahmin family and he himself lived the very orthodox life of a Tamil Brahmin. During his college days he came under the influence of his Mathematics teacher Edward Ross, a Scottish missionary who taught him the connectedness of everything from flowers to stars in the cosmos. Ranganathan regarded professor Ross his intellectual father. It was reinforced by the principle of Ekavakyata introduced to him by his friend, Professor S. Kuppuswami Sastri, a professor of philosophy at the Madras Christian College. Professional influence was mostly from W.C.B. Sayers. Ranganathan learned the grammar of classification from Sayers and from his books and far excelled him in this field. Ranganathan copied his teaching method. Study visits to more than 120 libraries in the United Kingdom helped him to generalise and formulate his famous Five Laws of Library Science. Science, especially mathematics, made his mind analytical. Ultimately two methods reveal the secrets of his creativity. These are uncanny capacity for abstraction and use of inductive methods and keen observations. His tremendously huge work is explained by his practice of work-chastity and large capacity to take pains. His religious orthodoxy and superstitions had no effect on his intellectual work. His view of intuition, which he believed aided his creativity and productivity, is not in tune with current cognitive theories.

Progress in education and research, which go hand in hand, are the two key variables to determine the societal impact and ensure the future sustainability of an academic discipline. Since the inception of Library and Information Science (LIS) as an accredited academic discipline, the Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC), Bangalore, has been a major, if not sole, progenitor of almost all pedagogical and research advances in the Indian LIS milieu. The present work, a first-of-its-kind historiography, presents a detailed multifaceted description of the historical origin of the DRTC. It also describes the vision, foundation and advances in LIS incubated at DRTC, the de-facto premier information school of the Indian subcontinent. The novelty of the paper, apart from being the first ever historical analysis of DRTC, lies in its exposition of several non-trivial trivia behind the foundation of DRTC which can inspire futuristic educational institution building in the Indian setting.

KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION is a forum for all those interested in the organization of knowledge on a universal or a domain-specific scale, using concept-analytical or concept-synthetical approaches, as well as quantitative and qualitative methodologies. KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION also addresses the intellectual and automatic compilation and use of classification systems and thesauri in all fields of knowledge, with special attention being given to the problems of terminology. KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION publishes original articles, reports on conferences and similar communications, as well as book reviews, letters to the editor, and an extensive annotated bibliography of recent classification and indexing literature. KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION should therefore be available at every university and research library of every country, at every information center, at colleges and schools of library and information science, in the hands of everybody interested in the fields mentioned above and thus also at every office for updating information on any topic related to the problems of order in our information-flooded times.