Brian Campbell Vickery quotes
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
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.
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
"We do not encourage initiative," said the factory manager. "What you must do is to learn to work to the safety rules." It was my first day in my first job, as a plant chemist in an explosives factory, located in the English countryside, in July 1941. Happily, he was quite wrong. We were not making some old, tried and tested explosive like nitroglycerine or TNT. It was the first large -scale production of a brand-new chemical, code-named RDX-Research Department eXplosive-developed by a government military research department.
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
The basic rules of classification are
- Each characteristic of division must produce at least two classes
- Only one principle of division must be used at a time, to produce mutually exclusive classes.
- The species of any genius must be completely exhaustive of their parent class.
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 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
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
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
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
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
Perhaps the most important lesson that we can learn from information history is that information provision has been and must be closely related to information need, and that the information sources we provide must be closely matched to the tasks being undertaken by the community served.
Brian Campbell Vickery
John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971) was undoubtedly the most important of the "Western" scientists who, during the twentieth century, accepted the Marxist view of social development. He did more than "accept" it: he tried to sketch the whole history of science from a Marxist viewpoint; he wrote a number of articles explicitly expounding his view of the relation of Marxism to science; and from his student days he played an active role in Communist politics. He has been criticised: during his lifetime, for too readily accepting official Soviet policy, whether relating to society or to science; since his death, for having been too ready to hope that his vision of the use of science for human ends could be implemented by capitalist societies; and at all times, for an allegedly simplistic faith in science as the salvation of mankind.
Brian Campbell Vickery