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“"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.

“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).

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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).

“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.

“”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).

“[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.

“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).

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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).