Brian Campbell Vickery - Field Quotes

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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
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
[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
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
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
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
… 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
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
The representation of knowledge in symbolic form is a matter that has pre-occupied the world of documentation since its origin. The problem is now relevant in many situations other than documents and indexes. The structure of records and files in databases: data structures in computer programming; the syntactic and semantic structure of natural language; knowledge representation in artificial intelligence; models of human memory: in all these fields it is necessary to decide how knowledge may be represented so that the representations may be manipulated.

Brian Campbell Vickery
In scientific information, then, we find that subjects - the themes and topics on which books and articles are written - cluster into fields, each of which can be analysed into its characteristic set of facets of terms.

Brian Campbell Vickery
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
Perhaps an underlying cause [of doubt as to the future of information science] is in some cases... the apprehension that information science may become submerged in the larger field of computer science.

Brian Campbell Vickery