Brian Campbell Vickery - Subject Quotes

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I suspect that teaching the history of our subject is less frequent in our institutions than it was. We are getting short-sighted both in looking forward and in looking backward, to our detriment.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The classification of subject matter may be carried out for all sort of special purposes - to arrange books on shelves, to group inventions in patents, to classify the raw materials, intermediates and products of importance to a particular manufacturer, and so on. All such arrangements have their particular uses and their particular problems.

Brian Campbell Vickery
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 problems of subject search on the Internet are no different in principle: search engines may permit easy location of verbally expressed topics, but we still seek to improve our methods of navigation.

Brian Campbell Vickery
An information retrieval system is therefore defined here as any device which aids access to documents specified by subject, and the operations associated with it. The documents can be books, journals, reports, atlases, or other records of thought, or any parts of such records—articles, chapters, sections, tables, diagrams, or even particular words. The retrieval devices can range from a bare list of contents to a large digital computer and its accessories. The operations can range from simple visual scanning to the most detailed programming.

Brian Campbell Vickery
The most important characteristic of documentary classification is that it is concerned with subjects, not just entities of taxonomic classification. What is the nature of the specific subjects - the themes on which books, parts of books, articles or parts of articles are written? A study of book titles alone would suggest that literary subjects have simple names like 'War, Religion', 'Boats', 'Musica; pitch', 'Colour', 'Acridines', 'Wild flowers', and so on. But the study of articles on the documentation level reveals that such titles are simple in appearance only. Such a literary subject is in reality a complex aggregate of specific subjects, eahc which is the main theme discussed from one particular aspect.

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
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
Classification in documentation is a tool for selection. It is essentially a 'finding system' for subject items... It is an artificial language, designed as a tool to aid in the selection of information from a store in response to search questions. The classification serves to standardise subject description, so that the description of a subject used by indexer and inquirer are more likely to coincide, thus maximising the probability of finding all items relevant to an inquiry.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Four basic operations in the effective use of graphic records (documents), to store information and make it available, have been listed by Hyslop: A, recording information in documents; B, storing recorded information—documentary items; C, identifying items containing information relevant to a given problem, situation, or subject; D, providing the identified items from storage. Information storage and retrieval in the wide sense covers all these operations. In the narrow sense used in this paper, information retrieval means only C, identifying documentary items by subject.

Brian Campbell Vickery
A retrieval system can be studied at three levels: The way in which units of information, and relevant relations between them, are defined in the system. This is the semantic level of subject analysis. The general structural features of the system considered as a network of units of information linked to each other and to documentary items. This may be called structural analysis. The physical mechanisms (hardware) in which the structure is embodied.

Brian Campbell Vickery
Facet analysis results in more varied, multidimensional relationships, at least in theory, better reflecting the complexity of subject knowledge

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
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
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