Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes

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The scope of a specialised documentary classification is usually designated by its title, the subject field that it professes to classify. It is no easy task to state what is meant by a subject field. In general it can be expressed as Thing-Activity. A definable group of things... is selected, and from the many relations in which they subsist a certain number are selected as relevant.

Brian Campbell Vickery
… it is most important – particularly in an immature field like information science - to accept that all modes of study and all analytical methods can make useful contributions, and not to denigrate [qualitative] models as just description

Brian Campbell Vickery
Bertie Brookes and I shared a common view that, beyond the practical activities of information provision, there could be discerned a more general science of information. He tended towards a mathematical formulation of this: I was more interested in its social aspects.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The crux of the retrieval problem is that selecting documents to read grows ever more difficult, and new techniques are continually needed.

Brian Campbell Vickery
I am always surprised that the information profession, so quick to sing the virtues of literature search for its customers, pays so little attention to its own history. I have been told: our problems are different from those of the past. It is not so the problems are often the same, only the technical means available for solution may be new. The thinking and experience of the past can often shed light on the present.

Brian Campbell Vickery
After my first encounter with Colon Classification in the Patent Office, and subsequent use of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) for the Akers library, I became increasingly interested in problems of information organisation for retrieval. My first paper in the field was "The Structure of a Connective Index" (Vickery, 1950).

Brian Campbell Vickery
I suspect that teaching the history of our subject is less frequent in our institutions than it was. We are getting short-sighted both in looking forward and in looking backward, to our detriment.

Brian Campbell Vickery
There is as yet no unified theory of retrieval systems, and a good deal of retrieval practice is still an empirical art, unsullied by theory.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Looking back, I ask myself why so little of the basic research has had an impact on professional practice.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The most important characteristic of documentary classification is that it is concerned with subjects, not just entities of taxonomic classification. What is the nature of the specific subjects - the themes on which books, parts of books, articles or parts of articles are written? A study of book titles alone would suggest that literary subjects have simple names like 'War, Religion', 'Boats', 'Musica; pitch', 'Colour', 'Acridines', 'Wild flowers', and so on. But the study of articles on the documentation level reveals that such titles are simple in appearance only. Such a literary subject is in reality a complex aggregate of specific subjects, eahc which is the main theme discussed from one particular aspect.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Classification in its simplest terms, means putting together things or ideas that are alike, and keeping separate those that are different.

Brian Campbell Vickery
An information retrieval system is therefore defined here as any device which aids access to documents specified by subject, and the operations associated with it. The documents can be books, journals, reports, atlases, or other records of thought, or any parts of such records—articles, chapters, sections, tables, diagrams, or even particular words. The retrieval devices can range from a bare list of contents to a large digital computer and its accessories. The operations can range from simple visual scanning to the most detailed programming.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The problems of subject search on the Internet are no different in principle: search engines may permit easy location of verbally expressed topics, but we still seek to improve our methods of navigation.

Brian Campbell Vickery
In the past, documentation has frequently been compared with librarianship, with some argument as to which comprehends the other. The field is more helpfully characterised if we take its scope to be all forms of document (i. e. any physical carrier of symbolic messages) and all aspects of their handling, from production to delivery. The document system then becomes very much wider than conventional librarianship – it includes publication and printing, distribution, some forms of telecommunication, analysis, storage, retrieval and delivery to the user.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Perhaps the most important lesson that we can learn from information history is that information provision has been and must be closely related to information need, and that the information sources we provide must be closely matched to the tasks being undertaken by the community served.

Brian Campbell Vickery