Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Brian Campbell Vickery
Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes
75 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
It is essential to stress that information science is not solely concerned with science information, nor indeed only with the provision of information to academic and professional workers, but with all forms of information transfer in society.
Brian Campbell Vickery
Source
Report...
I am whole-heartedly in favour of the profession learning more about the history of [information transfer]. We have a tendency to focus on the newest forms of information provision … neglecting the continued existence and continuing importance of all the previous forms… But our profession is not that of the historian (or sociologist or philosopher) interesting as their work may be.
Brian Campbell Vickery
Source
Report...
The areas traditionally concerned with such systems are: publishing in all its ramification, librarianship, bibliography, documentation, record management, archives and the like. Systematic study of the activities in all these areas has lead to increased recognition of their common features. They are all concerned with information systems, and their study may include in the wider field of 'information science and technology' (as the Americans put it) or 'informatics' (as Soviet writers would have it).
Brian Campbell Vickery
Source
Report...
Throughout the nineteenth century, apart from the division in theoretical sciences and arts, classifiers attempted to divide the sciences into two groups. Already they had before them the examples of Francis Bacon (speculative and descriptive) and Hobbes (quantitative and qualitative). For Coleridge, the sciences were either pure (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics) or mixed. Arthur Schopenhauer's similar groups were called pure and empirical, Wilhelm Wundt in 1887 called them formal and empirical, Globot mathematical and theoretical, and the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904) normative and physical. Karl Pearson made similar division of the sciences into abstract and concrete
Brian Campbell Vickery
Source
Report...
Classification in documentation is a tool for selection. It is essentially a 'finding system' for subject items... It is an artificial language, designed as a tool to aid in the selection of information from a store in response to search questions. The classification serves to standardise subject description, so that the description of a subject used by indexer and inquirer are more likely to coincide, thus maximising the probability of finding all items relevant to an inquiry.
Brian Campbell Vickery
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
User needs determine what functions should be provided, and different functions require different structures.
Brian Campbell Vickery
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
[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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
It is with this whole cycle [between generation and use of information] that information science is now concerned.
Brian Campbell Vickery
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
"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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
The principles of information science apply, whatever the medium of transfer.
Brian Campbell Vickery
1
2
3
Quote of the day
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert F. Kennedy
Brian Campbell Vickery
Born:
September 11, 1918
Died:
October 17, 2009
(aged 91)
Bio:
Brian Campbell Vickery was a British information scientist and classification researcher, and Professor and director at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London from 1973 to 1983.
Most used words:
science
classification
subject
knowledge
retrieval
concerned
profession
transfer
field
system
study
practice
documents
people
work
Brian Campbell Vickery on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes
Brian Campbell Vickery Short Quotes
British Computer scientist Quotes
Computer scientist Quotes
20th-century Computer scientist Quotes
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes