Brian Campbell Vickery - Profession 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
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
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
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
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
Despite the fact that our profession constantly urges others to consult the literature, I do not think we are distinguished nowadays by knowledge of our heritage.

Brian Campbell Vickery
For the profession as a whole, it is necessary that our hard-won understanding of our discipline be handed on to the next generation in a formal way.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The job of our profession is to facilitate the provision of knowledge (in all forms) to those who need it (for whatever purpose).

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
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
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
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