Brian Campbell Vickery: Information

Brian Campbell Vickery was British information theorist. Explore interesting quotes on information.
Brian Campbell Vickery: 168 quotes0 likes

“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".

“[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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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".

“[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.

“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.

“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.

“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).

“Bertie Brookes and I shared a common view that, beyond the practical activities of information provision, there could be discerned a more general science of information. He tended towards a mathematical formulation of this: I was more interested in its social aspects.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 24-25.

“Systems transfer or transform materials, energy or information - and usually all three. An information system is one whose prime function is to transfer or transform information: the telephone system is an obvious example. This book concentrates on certain types of information system: those concerned with the transfer of information between specialists, mainly with reference to their work, and mainly based on documents. The focus is thus on specialised documentary information systems.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Preface; First paragraph
Information Systems (1973)

“It is with this whole cycle [between generation and use of information] that information science is now concerned.”

Brian Campbell Vickery

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 9; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).