Brian Campbell Vickery: Trending quotes (page 4)

“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.

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

B.C. Vickery (1970) Techniques of information retrieval, London: Butterworth. p. v; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011) " Brian Vickery and the foundations of information science http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/papers/robinson.pdf".

Problem , Science , Parting

“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..”

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. 133; As cited in Yasar Tonta, Yurdagül Ünal (2005) "Scatter of journals and literature obsolescence reflected in document delivery requests". JASIST 56(1): 84-94.

Communication , Literature , Study

“[Information] science and technology are now so closely linked that analysis and experiment lead quickly on to invention, to the introduction of new channels”

Brian Campbell Vickery

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

Science

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

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

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

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

Life , People , Communication , Sense

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Preface to the first edition.
Classification and indexing in science (1958)

Books , Problem

“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

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

People , Knowledge , Science , Personality

“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).”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 11.

Problem

“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…”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Brian Campbell Vickery (1999) " New Information Vistas http://faculty.libsci.sc.edu/bob/ISP/vickery2.htm".

Books , Science , Time , Success

“[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.’”

Brian Campbell Vickery

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

Nature

“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.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Preface (1961) p. vi; Partly cited by Stephen E. Robertson (2011) " On retrieval system theory http://www.iskouk.org/conf2011/papers/robertson.pdf".
On Retrieval System Theory (1961)

Art

“Information science is concerned with every aspect of the chain of information transfer activities, but the heart of its interest is information search.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

B.C. Vickery (1997) "Metatheory and information science," Journal of Documentation, 53(5), p. 460.

Search , Science , Heart

“Four basic operations in the effective use of graphic records (documents), to store information and make it available, have been listed by Hyslop: A, recording information in documents; B, storing recorded information—documentary items; C, identifying items containing information relevant to a given problem, situation, or subject; D, providing the identified items from storage. Information storage and retrieval in the wide sense covers all these operations. In the narrow sense used in this paper, information retrieval means only C, identifying documentary items by subject.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

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

Problem , Sense

“The scientific study of the communication of information in society – “information science” in the sense of an academic discipline…”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 11; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).