Brian Campbell Vickery - People Quotes

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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
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
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
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
Information science emerges (a) when conceptual explorations, not directed towards immediate practical or technical ends, begin to take place, and (b) they are seen to be concerned with a definable area of interest [that of facilitating the transmission of information between people].

Brian Campbell Vickery
[The particular concern of the information scientist] is with the process as a whole – the interaction between the three elements [information behaviour, records, channels] that leads to people becoming informed.

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 practice is concerned with facilitating the interaction between knowledge seekers – through channels – with knowledge (personal and recorded). Stepping back from practice, we may see the role of the science as exploring the characteristics of people and their information behaviour, the features of knowledge records of every kind, the variety of channels (oral, written, printed, graphic, digital) that may be used to transmit information, and how the three elements interact.

Brian Campbell Vickery