Brian Campbell Vickery quotes - page 3

The principles of information science apply, whatever the medium of transfer. (Brian Campbell Vickery)
Looking back, I ask myself why so little of the basic research has had an impact on professional practice. View quote
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”. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
The preface to the first edition of this book... shows that in 1958 the classification ideas in it were felt to controversial, needing to be championed. A few years before, the had issued a memorandum proclaiming "the need for a faceted classification as the basis of all methods of information retrieval'. As part-author of this memorandum, I must now judge the claim to have been too bold, even brash. View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
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. View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
The physical mechanisms (hardware) in which the structure is embodied. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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)
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. View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
User needs determine what functions should be provided, and different functions require different structures. View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
Documentation is a practice concerned with all the processes involved in transferring documents from sources to users. View quote
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. View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
Neither citation nor loan demand is an adequate measure of literature use by a large community. Each is only an indicator, illuminating some aspects of use but with its own inherent bias. The joint study of several indicators gives a more balanced picture.. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
An information system is an organisation of people, materials and machines that serves to facilitate the transfer of information from one person to another. Its function is social: to aid human communication. If we take this to mean all reception of signals by the human senses (sight, sound, small, touch, taste,...)- then communication is an incessant and essential accompaniment of all human activity. If we restrict the meaning of signals to flowing between people, much of the daily life of most of us is occupied by such interpersonal acts. View quote
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. View quote
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)
After my first encounter with (UDC) for the Akers library, I became increasingly interested in problems of information organisation for retrieval. My first paper in the field was "The Structure of a Connective Index" (Vickery, 1950). View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
I would pinpoint 1958 as a special time in my career. I had for some years been working with the Classification Research Group in London, and in 1957 we had held a small but successful conference to which Jesse Shera, Gene Garfield and others had come from the USA. In 1958 I published my first book, Classification and Indexing in Science, and attended the International Conference on Scientific Information in Washington. This was my first visit to the USA - I flew in a US Army transport plane with, John O'Connor and Desmond Bernal. The experience of attending the conference, and of other visits I paid at that time, led to the writing of my second book, On Retrieval System Theory... View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
[There has been] a widening of the field covered by the concept of "information”, both its theory and its practice. Information transfer has been put on a par with the transfer of matter and energy, as one of the primary natural processes.' View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery
There is as yet no unified theory of retrieval systems, and a good deal of retrieval practice is still an empirical art, unsullied by theory. View quote
Brian Campbell Vickery