Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes (84 quotes)

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Famous Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes

“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

Source: Information history – an introduction (2009), p. 246.

“The old-established groups in the information profession… have come to recognise that many other social groups are concerned with information transfer.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Fifty years of information progress (1994), p. 7; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

“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

Brian Vickery (2006) " J.D.Bernal: science and social development http://web.archive.org/web/20100202233156/http://www.lucis.me.uk/bernal.htm" on lucis.me.uk, 2006.

“History presents a series of cultural epochs. Each is a span of years within which knowledge presents a more or less unified structure which can be expressed in a classification, but each new epoch requires a new classification.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Other Chapters, p. 147 Cited in: Madeline M. Henderson (1966) Cooperation, convertibility, and compatibility among information systems: a literature review. p. 72.

“My first encounter with the concept of "information service" came with the reading of The Social Function of Science by Desmond Bernal, first published in 1939-a work that stimulated a whole generation of young scientists to think about the role of science in society, its organisation, its future. In it, he wrote that in every laboratory "there should be someone deputed to watch the whole of current literature for items which might be relevant to the work of the laboratory, and to be able to indicate without loss of time where such items are likely to be found." Such a person "would have to be chosen partly for his comprehensive scientific interests, which need to be much greater than those of the other laboratory workers, and partly for his inclination to systematic thinking." Already I felt that I might be suited to such a role.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 4.

“I am always surprised that the information profession, so quick to sing the virtues of literature search for its customers, pays so little attention to its own history. I have been told: “our problems are different from those of the past”. It is not so the problems are often the same, only the technical means available for solution may be new. The thinking and experience of the past can often shed light on the present.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

B.C. Vickery (2008), "Emanuel Goldberg and his knowledge machine by Michael Buckland". Book review, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 40(2), p. 144.

Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes about science

“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

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 330.

“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

Source: Fifty years of information progress (1994), p. 7.

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

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Fifty years of information progress (1994), p. 9.

“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

Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxviii; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

“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

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 14.

“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

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 1; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Brian Campbell Vickery: Trending quotes

“All the elements of the process of “becoming informed”… are of interest to investigators other than “information scientists”… The totality of activity related to information today is necessarily a multidisciplinary exercise.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxiii; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Exercises

“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

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 3.

Disease , Family , Star , Tree

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Karl Pearson made similar division of the sciences into abstract and concrete
Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Other Chapters, p. 154.

Art , Mathematics , Science

Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes

“[The particular concern of the information scientist] is with the process as a whole – the interaction between the three elements [information behaviour, records, channels] that leads to people becoming informed.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxiii.

People

“Throughout life, all people are engaged in activities – practical or mental – trying to solve problems, activities that themselves give rise to problems. To solve these problems, people need knowledge. They can acquire this personal knowledge in two main ways. First, they can interrogate the world – natural and social – by means of closer observation, deeper analysis, controlled experiment, all forms of cognitive interaction. Second, they can enrich their personal knowledge by communicative interaction with the stock of public knowledge that mankind has built up over the millenia, thus acquiring what we may call information. The activities in which people engage also produce two other kinds of knowledge: that embodied in people (skills) and that embodied in their artefacts.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Brian Vickery (2005) " Information science, in 3 parts http://web.archive.org/web/20100201154159/http://www.lucis.me.uk/infosci1.htm" on lucis.me.uk, 2005.

Life , People , World , Way

“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

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 332.

Search , Study , Science

“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

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 3.

World , Literature , Question , Problem

“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

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 29.

History

“Facet analysis results in more varied, multidimensional relationships, at least in theory, better reflecting the complexity of subject knowledge”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Vickery (1960, p. 13) as cited in: Steven Blake Shubert (1996) Subject Access to Museum Objects p. 429.

Knowledge

“In the past, documentation has frequently been compared with librarianship, with some argument as to which comprehends the other. The field is more helpfully characterised if we take its scope to be all forms of document (i. e. any physical carrier of symbolic messages) and all aspects of their handling, from production to delivery. The document system then becomes very much wider than conventional librarianship – it includes publication and printing, distribution, some forms of telecommunication, analysis, storage, retrieval and delivery to the user.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Concepts of documentation (1978), p. 279; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Past

“What is now called ‘knowledge organisation’ in this context has a long history. The simplest forms of a knowledge organisation system (KOS) are, after all, the contents list and the index of a textbook. The knowledge is in the text; the KOS is a supplementary tool that helps the reader to find his way around the text. But as such finding aids have become more complex, and taken on wider functions, they have acquired grander names, such as retrieval languages, taxonomies, categorisations, lexicons, thesauri, or ontologies. They are now seen as schemes that organize, manage, and retrieve information.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

B.C. Vickery (2008) " On ‘knowledge organisation’ http://web.archive.org/web/20100125050134/http://www.lucis.me.uk/knowlorg.htm" published on lucis.me.uk, 2008.

Way , History , Knowledge , Help

“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

Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxii-xxiii; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Way , Understanding , Science

“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

Source: The Structure of Information Retrieval Systems (1959), p. 1275.

Books , Parting

“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

as Soviet writers would have it
Preface: second paragraph
Information Systems (1973)

Study , Science

“"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

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 3.

Learning

“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

Source: Information history – an introduction (2009), p. 284; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Knowledge , Appearance , Science , Drawing

“Citation does not necessarily reflect current demand.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Penelope Earle and Brian Campbell Vickery (1969), "Social Science Literature Use in the U.K. as Indicated by Citations," Journal of Documentation 25: p. 134.

“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

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 2.

Parent , Time

“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

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 11.

Science

“We communicate with each other to inform, to instruct, to persuade, to amuse, to annoy. Informing and instructing aim to alter the receiver's concepts, whereas persuading, amusing or annoying aim to change his preferences or feelings. In a work situation people do make jokes and enemies, and use the arts of persuasion, but much of their communication has an informal or instructional aspect.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 1.

People , Art , Feeling , Communication

“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

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 29.

Search , Spring , Reality , Science

“The service professions such as medicine and teaching have proud and age-old traditions. Only relatively recently have we realised that serving people's information needs can be as socially valuable as looking after their health and educational needs.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 1; Opening sentence.

People , Health , Age , Education

“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

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. v; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Understanding , Knowledge , Science , Future

“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

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 11.

Books

“”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

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 220; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

People , Science

“[Vickery in his handbook of procedures for making faceted classifications, writes that organizing a field into facets] can be achieved only by a detailed examination of the literature of the field”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Brian Campbell Vickery (1970) Faceted Classification: A Guide to Construction and Use of Special Schemes. p. 20 as cited in: Claire Beghtol (1986) " Semantic Validity: Concepts of Warrant in Bibliographic Classification Systems http://downloads.alcts.ala.org/lrts/lrtsv30no2.pdf" Library Resources & Technical Services. Vol 30. p. 113.

Literature

“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

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 330; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Communication , Study , Science

“The crux of the retrieval problem is that selecting documents to read grows ever more difficult, and new techniques are continually needed.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

B.C. Vickery (1970) Techniques of information retrieval. p. 5.

Problem , Reading

“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

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 11.

“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

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 8; Partly cited in Nigerian Library and Information Science Review (1987). Vol 5-8. p. 44.

War , Books , Religion , Flowers

“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

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 27.

People , Books , World , Feeling

“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

Source: Information history – an introduction (2009), p. 246.

History , Learning

“Interaction is the mode of life of living organisms. Each must feed on its environment, ingesting chemicals or other organisms. This is something more than "interaction", it is activity directed towards the environment. Since the organism must be selective in what it ingests, it needs to discriminate among the entities in its environment. From very primitive forms of discrimination, the sensory mechanisms of organisms have evolved into the senses of man, interpreted by an internal cognitive apparatus, memories of past experiences, and an ability to take rational decisions. By "rational" I mean activity that achieves intended results because it is based on a reliable understanding of the nature of the environment. In interacting with each other to carry out tasks jointly, men have further developed language, leading to a shared understanding of the environment. This shared understanding is knowledge.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Brian Vickery (2009) " The development of knowledge http://web.archive.org/web/20100125043520/http://www.lucis.me.uk/devtknow.htm" on lucis.me.uk, 2009.

Life , Men , Understanding , Nature

“Classification in its simplest terms, means putting together things or ideas that are alike, and keeping separate those that are different.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 1; Partly cited in Jens-Erik Mai (2010) Classiﬁcation in a social world: bias and trust http://jenserikmai.info/Papers/2010_Classificationinasocialworld.pdf Journal of Documentation Vol. 66 No. 5, 2010. p. 640; Also cited in ( Bawden, 1991 http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~dbawden/reactionspaper.pdf).

Idea

“I met Ranga on several occasions. He was a fascinating personality, highly organised, a tireless worker, a fierce enthusiast, a charming man. Speaking of his passion for work, he told me once how his young son had stuck a notice on his study door: “Librarianship is unfair to families”… It really was a privilege to have known him.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

B.C. Vickery (31 March 2008); Cited in Claudio Gnoli (2011) " Vickery’s late ideas on classification by phenomena and activities http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/papers/gnoli.pdf".

Family , Study , Passion , Personality

“The job of our profession is to facilitate the provision of knowledge (in all forms) to those who need it”

Brian Campbell Vickery

for whatever purpose
Source: Information history – an introduction (2009), p. 246; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Knowledge

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

The Structure of Information Retrieval Systems (1959)

“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

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 25.

Science

“Four years ago, when the first edition of this book was written, information retrieval was beginning to crystallize out as a unified discipline. The process has gone further today. Several other books… have also offered a general survey, although each has contributed its own special emphasis. Many conferences on the subject have been held, and a constant stream of new articles has appeared, both in documentation journals and in those in the data processing field.
Information retrieval is now recognized as a discipline, and further advances in theory are being made, What I described in the first edition as the key operation in retrieval — the subject description of documents — is being explored theoretically and experimentally, although we are still a long way from reducing this operation to rule (Chapter 3). There has been less new work on the design of descriptor languages, although ideas on the display of descriptor relations through thesauri and 'semantic maps' have been developed (Chapter 4). Access to files has been examined, particularly by those experienced in data processing.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Preface to second edition (1965). p. v.
On Retrieval System Theory (1961)

Books , Way , Idea , Appearance

“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

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 9-11.

Appearance , Science , Time , Training

“Looking back, I ask myself why so little of the basic research has had an impact on professional practice.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 27.

“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”.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Information history – an introduction (2009), p. 246.

People , Communication , Success

“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

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 29.

Education , Knowledge , Training

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Preface to third edition; Partly cited in: Vanda Broughton (2011) " Brian Vickery and the Classification Research Group: the legacy of faceted classification http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/papers/broughton.pdf" p. 6
Classification and indexing in science (1958)

Books , Idea , Parting

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Have things changed?
Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 25; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Intelligence , Science , Change

“The physical mechanisms (hardware) in which the structure is embodied.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: The Structure of Information Retrieval Systems (1959), p. 1275.

“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

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 12-13.

Search , Question

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Vickery (1998) "The Royal Society scientific information conference of 1948." Journal of Documentation, 54(3), p. 283; As cited in: Vanda Broughton (2011) " Brian Vickery and the Classification Research Group: the legacy of faceted classification http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/papers/broughton.pdf".

Literature , Knowledge , Thinking

“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

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 11; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Search , Problem

“… 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

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 331; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Study , Science

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

The Structure of Information Retrieval Systems (1959)

Way

“User needs determine what functions should be provided, and different functions require different structures.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

B.C. Vickery (1971) "Structure and function in retrieval languages," Journal of Documentation, 27(2), p. 74; As cited in: Alan Gilchrist, Judi Vernau (2012) Facets of Knowledge Organization: Proceedings of the ISKO UK. p. 293.

“Documentation is a practice concerned with all the processes involved in transferring documents from sources to users.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Concepts of documentation (1978), p. 279 as cited in: Alvin M. Schrader (1983) Toward a Theory of Library and Information Science. Vol. 1. p. 322.