Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

Only in a very static profession can one be trained to slot in immediately to an available job, and our profession is far from static. It is more beneficial for the students to give them a generalised grounding in a wide variety of professional activities and concerns, so that they will have some background knowledge for no matter what job is first available. For those who seek it, our subject also has its cultural value, which can contribute to a general education.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The term information science first appeared in the guise of information scientist. Particularly in industry during recent decades, some qualified scientists moved out of research, development of production into a new occupational role, that of providing an active information service to their colleagues. They regarded themselves as information scientists rather than research scientists. As this kind of work expanded and became formalized the need was seen to provide training for those who would enter the occupation. In time, the content of this training came to be called 'information science'.

Brian Campbell Vickery
In seeking scientific understanding of the processes of information transfer we have had to go considerably outside the subject limits within which 'information science' as an academic subject is normally constrained... It has become increasingly clear that only by widening its knowledge base can information science establish a solid foundation for future development.

Brian Campbell Vickery
An information system is an organisation of people, materials and machines that serves to facilitate the transfer of information from one person to another. Its function is social: to aid human communication. If we take this to mean all reception of signals by the human senses (sight, sound, small, touch, taste,...)- then communication is an incessant and essential accompaniment of all human activity. If we restrict the meaning of signals to flowing between people, much of the daily life of most of us is occupied by such interpersonal acts.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Information science is concerned with every aspect of the chain of information transfer activities, but the heart of its interest is information search.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The structural tools developed by the profession – hierarchical classifications, facets, thesaural relations, topic maps, the predicates used in ontology – will still be of use, provided that they can in each case pass a test of utility.

Brian Campbell Vickery
User needs determine what functions should be provided, and different functions require different structures.

Brian Campbell Vickery
There does seem to be among some members of our profession a rather desperate search for a "fundamental theory of information", which leads them to attempt to derive our practice from disciplines such as epistemology, or hermeneutics, or discourse analysis, or semiotics, or even "cybersemiotics". Their derivations rarely make adequate contact with the realities of information practice … The theory of a science should spring from deep immersion in its practice.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The classification of subject matter may be carried out for all sort of special purposes - to arrange books on shelves, to group inventions in patents, to classify the raw materials, intermediates and products of importance to a particular manufacturer, and so on. All such arrangements have their particular uses and their particular problems.

Brian Campbell Vickery
[There has been] a widening of the field covered by the concept of information, both its theory and its practice. Information transfer has been put on a par with the transfer of matter and energy, as one of the primary natural processes.'

Brian Campbell Vickery
Our profession is concerned with three "aspects of the world". First, how people behave when they feel a need for information; second, characteristics of documentary information that constrain how we can manipulate it; and third, characteristics of the physical media that carry the information, whether they be static books or dynamic electronic networks.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Information systems, at any level of complexity above that of speech, necessarily involve technologies such as printing, telecommunications, or computers. However, to information science technical potentialities and constraints are of importance mainly in that they affect the social relations concerned.

Brian Campbell Vickery
It is with this whole cycle [between generation and use of information] that information science is now concerned.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The old-established groups in the information profession... have come to recognise that many other social groups are concerned with information transfer.

Brian Campbell Vickery
We communicate with each other to inform, to instruct, to persuade, to amuse, to annoy. Informing and instructing aim to alter the receiver's concepts, whereas persuading, amusing or annoying aim to change his preferences or feelings. In a work situation people do make jokes and enemies, and use the arts of persuasion, but much of their communication has an informal or instructional aspect.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The field of study [of information science] is so wide and varied; research is necessarily restricted to accessible areas; it often (and rightly) has the practical aim of providing guidance in a specific situation, rather than searching for generalisations; the isolation of variables for investigation is often so difficult; rarely can confirmatory experiments be undertaken.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The structure if a fully developed classification can be technically described in the following way:
(1) The whole collection (universe) of entities (in this case subject terms) may be divided into a series of fields...
(2) Each field may be divided into a series of facets...
(3) Each facet may be structured into a hierarchy, subdivided stage by stage into a series of characteristics...
(4) Rules may be provided for combining (coordinating) terms...
(5) Each field, facet and term may be coded to fix its position in the whole system...
(6)An alphabetical index to the terms, facets and fields may be provided, showing the code of each

Brian Campbell Vickery
"We do not encourage initiative," said the factory manager. "What you must do is to learn to work to the safety rules." It was my first day in my first job, as a plant chemist in an explosives factory, located in the English countryside, in July 1941. Happily, he was quite wrong. We were not making some old, tried and tested explosive like nitroglycerine or TNT. It was the first large -scale production of a brand-new chemical, code-named RDX-Research Department eXplosive-developed by a government military research department.

Brian Campbell Vickery
History presents a series of cultural epochs. Each is a span of years within which knowledge presents a more or less unified structure which can be expressed in a classification, but each new epoch requires a new classification.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The principles of information science apply, whatever the medium of transfer.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The preface to the first edition of this book... shows that in 1958 the classification ideas in it were felt to controversial, needing to be championed. A few years before, the Classification Research Group had issued a memorandum proclaiming the need for a faceted classification as the basis of all methods of information retrieval'. As part-author of this memorandum, I must now judge the claim to have been too bold, even brash.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The service professions such as medicine and teaching have proud and age-old traditions. Only relatively recently have we realised that serving people's information needs can be as socially valuable as looking after their health and educational needs.

Brian Campbell Vickery
In its whole sweep, therefore, information work includes: science, that helps us to understand our problems; technology, that helps us to solve them; and the art of participating in each delicate interpersonal communication into which we are invited. The fusion of these three aspects of the craft creates a triple glow of optimal service.

Brian Campbell Vickery
What is now called 'knowledge organisation' in this context has a long history. The simplest forms of a knowledge organisation system (KOS) are, after all, the contents list and the index of a textbook. The knowledge is in the text; the KOS is a supplementary tool that helps the reader to find his way around the text. But as such finding aids have become more complex, and taken on wider functions, they have acquired grander names, such as retrieval languages, taxonomies, categorisations, lexicons, thesauri, or ontologies. They are now seen as schemes that organize, manage, and retrieve information.

Brian Campbell Vickery
In science there are uses many classifications of entities - plants, animals, rocks, soils, stars, diseases, occupations, and so on. In these taxonomies a classification must display genetic relations - for example, an evolutionary family tree of animal species - but its prime purpose is to aid in the identification of entities... Classification enables us to select, from the whole universe of known entities, the one that best matches one newly encountered.

Brian Campbell Vickery
All the elements of the process of becoming informed... are of interest to investigators other than information scientists … The totality of activity related to information today is necessarily a multidisciplinary exercise.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Citation does not necessarily reflect current demand.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Information retrieval is now an accepted part of the new discipline of information science and technology... I have concentrated on the field with which I am most familiar, the problems of bibliographic description and subject analysis.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The scientific study of the communication of information in society – information science in the sense of an academic discipline...

Brian Campbell Vickery
Mass communications analysts concentrate on who sends what information, for what purposes, through what channels, to which people, with what effect. The information profession is more interested in who seeks what information, for what purposes, through what channels, from which people and sources, with what success.

Brian Campbell Vickery