Douglas John Foskett Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

The CRG turned its thoughts towards a much more complex matter that had received little attention from any of the other schools of thought which had been represented at the two Conferences [Dorking and ICSI]. This is the relation between general and special classifications: is there anything to be gained by pursuing the ideal of a new universal classification scheme, and if so, how will the specialist's need be served by it? How can the CRG schemes, for example, that prove so satisfactory for their users, be integrated into such a general scheme?

Douglas John Foskett
The retrieval process begins when a lack of information shows itself in a human mind and the decision is taken to find out if this information has been discovered and published

Douglas John Foskett
In all this, I have made no mention of punched cards and all the other hardware. The CRG would have been hard put to it to ignore this, even if it had wanted to, which it does not. We believe, however, that there will, in the foreseeable future, remain a need for classification to provide research workers with the opportunity for browsing and for imposing some discipline on a literature that tends always towards greater disorder. We believe that, since hundreds of millions of dollars and rubles are being spent on hardware, and fat volumes roll off the presses almost day and night, that ten shillings a year that the CRG collects from its members will not be missed.

Douglas John Foskett
Since books are not their primary source materials, as they are for research in the humanities, most scientists prefer to spend their time on experiments and not on reading.

Douglas John Foskett
The work of the information officer [should be] regarded as the natural dynamic extension of that of the librarian.

Douglas John Foskett
The purpose of a classification scheme is to arrange information, in documents on shelves or on cards in indexes, in a sequence that will be helpful to the user.

Douglas John Foskett
[The Classification Research Group was] a typical British affair, with no resources beyond the native wit of its members, no allegiance to any existing system of classification, no fixed target, no recognition by the British Government (naturally), and at first only an amused tolerance from the library profession.

Douglas John Foskett
The discovery of new knowledge for ourselves, then, means the assimilation of public information into our unique context of thought. ie can establish relations between ideas and concepts which are not available to anyone else, because no-one else has precisely the same system of information available.

Douglas John Foskett
In 1948, it was agreed that a study of classification should be made, and a committee of scientists was appointed under the leadership of Professor. J. D. Bernal.

Douglas John Foskett
Information retrieval consists of four main stages: Identifying the exact subject of the search; Locating this subject in a guide which refers the searcher to one or more documents; Locating the documents; Locating the required information in the documents.

Douglas John Foskett
Scientists are more profitably occupied at the bench that in the library

Douglas John Foskett
All information services are ultimately based on library methods and materials.

Douglas John Foskett
Facet analysis consists in an analysis of a subject in its entirety into a certain number of facets or categories of things; within each category, the subject headings enumerated all possess the same relationship vis-&-vis the subject in its entirety.

Douglas John Foskett
After a great deal of (quite valuable) discussion, the British Classification Research Group accepted that 'facet analysis' must be the basis of a classification scheme able to meet the modern requirements.

Douglas John Foskett
The same thing can be identified by many different terms, and the same term may mean many different things.

Douglas John Foskett
The aim of an information service is to organise the literature on a systematic basis in order to save the time of research workers.

Douglas John Foskett
We define a fruitful partnership between our twin professions of librarian and information systems scientist in support of this adventure in creativity, and the pursuit of wisdom? If it is the nature of the creative mind that it sets out to grapple with the tensions and contradictions in the "paradigm", as Kuhn calls it, it follows that first of all one must know what the paradigm is.

Douglas John Foskett
Classification is thought of by many librarians as either a fearful complication of a very simply act, or an outmoded, almost prehistoric, method of doing a very complex mathematical task.

Douglas John Foskett
During... ten years the C. R. G. has met nearly every month, and although it has never had more than about a dozen active members, its influence has grown to the point at which is causes Mortimer Taube in America to rage over its medieval scholasticism, John Metcalfe in Australia to denounce it as a plot by Ranganathan to ruin librarianship, and a British University librarian to describe it as one of the two most significant developments in British librarianship since the end of the war.

Douglas John Foskett