At the Future Forum conference in Dresden, I had the opportunity to hang out with Ranga Yogeshwar, a well-known television science journalist in Germany. We were deep into conversation at the speakers dinner when I mentioned that I work in a library, and he mentioned that his grandfather had been an earlly library scientist. It turns out that his grandfather was none other than S.R. Ranganathan, the father of library science. Among other things, Ranganathan invented the “Colon Classification System” (worst name ever) that uses facets to enable multiple simultaneous classifications, an idea that really needed computers to be fulfilled. Way ahead of his time.

So, the next day I took the opportunity to stick my phone in Ranga’s face and ask him some intrusive, personal questions about his grandfather:

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