Brian Campbell Vickery - Practice Quotes

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

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
Documentation is a practice concerned with all the processes involved in transferring documents from sources to users.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Information practice... consists of two activities that we may call diagnosis and prevention. Diagnosis is identifying what is the most probable information need of a user in a particular state of information want. Provision is deciding what action is most likely to meet that need. Information science seeks to understand the potential range of user situations giving rise to information want and needs; to develop methods of identifying the actual information needed; to understand and expand the range of possible ways of satisfying information need; and to develop methods of deciding what way is most likely to be effective in a particular case.

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
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