Brian Campbell Vickery - Science Quotes

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Theoretical research in information science is still marked by a tendency to play safe... it is still marked by timidity. It could now afford to be more boldly speculative, intellectually exciting and therefore more attractive to intelligent and ambitious students. Have things changed?

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
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
The area of scientific interest is... the study of the objectives, functions, structure, properties, behaviour, performance and effects of informative communication processes and information systems. To this study the name "information science" can legitimately be attached.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Varied views were put forward as to the content and priorities of information science, though there was general agreement that its central topics should be information organisation, dissemination and retrieval.

Brian Campbell Vickery
It is essential to stress that information science is not solely concerned with science information, nor indeed only with the provision of information to academic and professional workers, but with all forms of information transfer in society.

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
Throughout the nineteenth century, apart from the division in theoretical sciences and arts, classifiers attempted to divide the sciences into two groups. Already they had before them the examples of Francis Bacon (speculative and descriptive) and Hobbes (quantitative and qualitative). For Coleridge, the sciences were either pure (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Mathematics, Metaphysics) or mixed. Arthur Schopenhauer's similar groups were called pure and empirical, Wilhelm Wundt in 1887 called them formal and empirical, Globot mathematical and theoretical, and the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences (1904) normative and physical. Karl Pearson made similar division of the sciences into abstract and concrete

Brian Campbell Vickery
The term information science first appeared in the guise of information scientist. Particularly in industry during recent decades, some qualified scientists moved out of research, development of production into a new occupational role, that of providing an active information service to their colleagues. They regarded themselves as information scientists rather than research scientists. As this kind of work expanded and became formalized the need was seen to provide training for those who would enter the occupation. In time, the content of this training came to be called 'information science'.

Brian Campbell Vickery
In seeking scientific understanding of the processes of information transfer we have had to go considerably outside the subject limits within which 'information science' as an academic subject is normally constrained... It has become increasingly clear that only by widening its knowledge base can information science establish a solid foundation for future development.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Information science is concerned with every aspect of the chain of information transfer activities, but the heart of its interest is information search.

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... 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
Information science is identified as... the study of the communication of information in society. This meaning is only beginning to emerge from its practical background, the social activity of facilitating information transfer.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The analogy with bibliographic classifications and thesauri is obvious... despite the differences, it is to be regretted that 'ontological engineers' make little or no reference to work in information science. As a consequence, they do not appear to draw at all on the rich experience of constructing knowledge schedules … or... developing concept lexicons.

Brian Campbell Vickery
In science there are uses many classifications of entities - plants, animals, rocks, soils, stars, diseases, occupations, and so on. In these taxonomies a classification must display genetic relations - for example, an evolutionary family tree of animal species - but its prime purpose is to aid in the identification of entities... Classification enables us to select, from the whole universe of known entities, the one that best matches one newly encountered.

Brian Campbell Vickery
[Information] science and technology are now so closely linked that analysis and experiment lead quickly on to invention, to the introduction of new channels (and documents).

Brian Campbell Vickery
The development of information research has increased considerably the interaction of emerging information science with other disciplines. Librarianship has traditionally had links with education and classification and has drawn ideas from logic and philosophy. But during the last fifty years new insights and methods have been derived from sociology and social psychology, from computer science, from operations research and related quantitative approaches, from communications research, from linguistics, and most recently from the new hybrids: cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

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
Scientific information is faced with the following problem. On the one hand, we have the world's literature of science and technology, past and present, in many languages; on the other, and enquirer with a question. How to select, from a vast mass of words, the few that are the most closely relevant to an enquiry? It is this selection process that makes use of classification.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The scientific study of the communication of information in society – information science in the sense of an academic discipline...

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
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
Information systems, at any level of complexity above that of speech, necessarily involve technologies such as printing, telecommunications, or computers. However, to information science technical potentialities and constraints are of importance mainly in that they affect the social relations concerned.

Brian Campbell Vickery
It is with this whole cycle [between generation and use of information] that information science is now concerned.

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
The principles of information science apply, whatever the medium of transfer.

Brian Campbell Vickery
In its whole sweep, therefore, information work includes: science, that helps us to understand our problems; technology, that helps us to solve them; and the art of participating in each delicate interpersonal communication into which we are invited. The fusion of these three aspects of the craft creates a triple glow of optimal service.

Brian Campbell Vickery