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Douglas John Foskett OBE was a British librarian and library and information scientist, and author of several special ‘faceted’ classification systems.Born in London on 27 June 1918. He received his BA from Queen Mary College in 1939 and in 1954 his MA at Birkbeck, University of London. He started his career in the late 1930s as a librarian in the Ilford Public Libraries in Essex. During World War II he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and later in the Intelligence Corps. From 1948 to 1957 he was Head of Information in the Research Division of the Metal Box Company Limited. In 1957 to 1978 he was at the Library of the Institute of Education in London, where he devised and implemented the specialist London Education Classification scheme to organize the library's collections. The last five years before retirement he was Director at the Central Library Services of the University of London.In the early 1950s Foskett was among the founding members of the Classification Research Group. He was active member of British Library Association. For 5 years he was a member of Unesco's International Advisory Committee on Libraries, Documentation and Archives. Also visiting Professor in MIT, in Ghana, Ibadan, Brazil and Iceland.His brother, Tony , was also a librarian and teacher of information science. Wikipedia  

✵ 27. June 1918 – 7. May 2004
Douglas John Foskett: 24   quotes 0   likes

Famous Douglas John Foskett Quotes

“The discovery of new knowledge for ourselves, then, means the assimilation of public information into our unique context of thought. ie can establish relations between ideas and concepts which are not available to anyone else, because no-one else has precisely the same system of information available.”

Douglas John Foskett

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

“During… ten years the C. R. G. has met nearly every month, and although it has never had more than about a dozen active members, its influence has grown to the point at which is causes Mortimer Taube in America to rage over its medieval scholasticism, John Metcalfe in Australia to denounce it as a plot by Ranganathan to ruin librarianship, and a British University librarian to describe it as one of the two most significant developments in British librarianship since the end of the war.”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 127

“The CRG turned its thoughts towards a much more complex matter that had received little attention from any of the other schools of thought which had been represented at the two Conferences [Dorking and ICSI]. This is the relation between general and special classifications: is there anything to be gained by pursuing the ideal of a new universal classification scheme, and if so, how will the specialist's need be served by it? How can the CRG schemes, for example, that prove so satisfactory for their users, be integrated into such a general scheme?”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 133 as cited in:

“In 1948, it was agreed that a study of classification should be made, and a committee of scientists was appointed under the leadership of Professor. J. D. Bernal.”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 127

“The term ‘informatics’ was first advanced formally by the Director of VINITI, A. I. Mikhailov, and his colleagues A. I. Chernyi and R. S. Gilyarevskii, in their paper Informatics—new name for the theory of Scientific Information published at the end of 1966. An English translation was circularized in the beginning of 1967. As the authors state in this paper, they are not the first to use this term, and they quote a review by Professor J. G. Dorfmann of their own book Fundamentals of Scientific Information in which Dorfmann criticizes the use of other terminology, such as ‘documentation’, ‘documentalistics’, ‘information science’, and so on. Although the authors do not object to the use of the word ‘Documentation’ in the name of the International Federation for Documentation, nevertheless they claim that this term has not found application in the USSR and indeed they apologize for spending some time in discussing its suitability as a name for ‘the new scientific discipline which studies the structure and properties of scientific information as well as the regularities of scientific information activity, its theory, history, methods, and organization’.”

Douglas John Foskett

Foskett (1970) "‘Informatics’", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 26 Iss: 4, p. 340

“In all this, I have made no mention of punched cards and all the other hardware. The CRG would have been hard put to it to ignore this, even if it had wanted to, which it does not. We believe, however, that there will, in the foreseeable future, remain a need for classification to provide research workers with the opportunity for browsing and for imposing some discipline on a literature that tends always towards greater disorder. We believe that, since hundreds of millions of dollars and rubles are being spent on hardware, and fat volumes roll off the presses almost day and night, that ten shillings a year that the CRG collects from its members will not be missed.”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 137

Douglas John Foskett Quotes

“Since books are not their primary source materials, as they are for research in the humanities, most scientists prefer to spend their time on experiments and not on reading.”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: Information service in libraries (1958), p. 9

Books , Time , Reading

“The purpose of a classification scheme is to arrange information, in documents on shelves or on cards in indexes, in a sequence that will be helpful to the user.”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 93; As cited in: Mei Hong (2006, p. 44)

Help

“Classification is thought of by many librarians as either a fearful complication of a very simply act, or an outmoded, almost prehistoric, method of doing a very complex mathematical task.”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 138

Fear , Mathematics

“[The Classification Research Group was] a typical British affair, with no resources beyond the native wit of its members, no allegiance to any existing system of classification, no fixed target, no recognition by the British Government (naturally), and at first only an amused tolerance from the library profession.”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 127; As cited in Shawne D Miksa (2002) Pigeonholes and punchcards : identifying the division between library classification research and information retrieval research, 1952-1970. http://courses.unt.edu/smiksa/documents/Miksa_Dissertation_2002.pdf

Nature

“Information retrieval consists of four main stages: Identifying the exact subject of the search; Locating this subject in a guide which refers the searcher to one or more documents; Locating the documents; Locating the required information in the documents.”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 6 ; As cited in: Mei Hong (2006) " Potential Usage of Faceted Classification in Internet ‘‘Information Retrieval’’ http://ir.library.tohoku.ac.jp/re/bitstream/10097/17406/1/12_43.pdf" Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Vol. 12, No. 1, p. 51

Search

“The aim of an information service is to organise the literature on a systematic basis in order to save the time of research workers.”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 4; as cited in: Melanie Feinberg (2007) "Beyond information retrieval"

Literature , Time

“After six years of war service, I rejoined Ilford Public Library service in 1946, and set about completing my F. L. A., begun in 1940. This service had a good tradition of assistance to readers, and when I joined the Metal Box C. in 1948, I soon realised how the skills required for a scientific and industrial research “information officer” depended on the basic techniques of librarianship, notably classification and cataloguing. The enhancement of these led to the development of higher levels, in literature searching, and, more particularly, in current awareness service and selective dissemination of information….
Meeting with S. R. Ranganathan in 1948 gave me a new view of classification as facet analysis plus traditional generic analysis and I applied this in schemes for Packaging, Occupational Safety and Health, and Education. This experience has suggested to me that facet analysis applied to any subject can reveal hitherto uncoordinated concepts - materials, processes, etc – and thus offer an indication of possible areas of future research. This could be a unique Information Science to the World Wide Web.”

Douglas John Foskett

Douglas Foskett (2000-04) " From Librarianship to Information Science http://faculty.libsci.sc.edu/bob/scrapbook/foskett2.htm" at

War , Health , World , Education

“All information services are ultimately based on library methods and materials.”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: Information service in libraries (1958), p. 13

“After a great deal of (quite valuable) discussion, the British Classification Research Group accepted that ‘facet analysis’ must be the basis of a classification scheme able to meet the modern requirements.”

Douglas John Foskett

Attributed to Foskett in: T. Tyaganatarajan (1961) "A study in the developments of colon classification." American Documentation. Vol 12 (4), p. 270

“The retrieval process begins when a lack of information shows itself in a human mind and the decision is taken to find out if this information has been discovered and published”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 86; As cited in: Mei Hong (2006, p. 44)

Decision

“The same thing can be identified by many different terms, and the same term may mean many different things.”

Douglas John Foskett

As cited in: Derek Austin (1977) "Perspective paper: Library Science" in: Donald E. Walker et al. eds. Natural language in information science. p. 48
Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963)

“We define a fruitful partnership between our twin professions of librarian and information systems scientist in support of this adventure in creativity, and the pursuit of wisdom? If it is the nature of the creative mind that it sets out to grapple with the tensions and contradictions in the "paradigm", as Kuhn calls it, it follows that first of all one must know what the paradigm is.”

Douglas John Foskett

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

Wisdom , Support , Nature , Partnership

“Few inventions have had so rapid and wide-ranging effects as the various machines which now process data and information by electronic energy. But I hope and believe that even these remarkable engines will not supersede the book as an instrument for the transfer of information. I remain sceptical, particularly when I see the advocates of the paperless society and the electronic library writing large books to support their case. I earnestly hope and believe also that libraries, as the records and memory of humanity, can form a fruitful partnership with the latest tools invented to ease the burden of our labour. Provided that these tools are efficiently operated by well-thought-out systems for organising and retrieving information, they offer the possibilities and opportunities for librarians and information specialists in all types of institution to meet the challenges of the new millennium.”

Douglas John Foskett

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

Books , Hope , Support , Memory

“It was a dramatic moment in the history of our civilisation when, in about the year 240 B. C., Archimedes leapt out of his bath and ran naked into the street of Syracuse shouting "Eureka" - "I have found it!" He had found the theoretical answer to a practical problem, that of finding the specific gravity of solids, known ever since as "Archimedes' Principle". We know this because Archimedes had written and published many books, on mathematics and mechanics, and some of these have survived and are preserved in libraries for us to use today. He made a major contribution to the progress of humanity, and over the centuries, that progress has been continually stimulated and accelerated by the invention of new theories, new tools and machines, which explain our world, and lighten the burden of securing the basic necessities of life.”

Douglas John Foskett

Librarians and Information Systems (1995)

Life , Books , World , History

“Scientists are more profitably occupied at the bench that in the library”

Douglas John Foskett

Source: Information service in libraries (1958), p. 9

“The Classification Research Group (C. R. G.) in London has been discussing for some years the theory of documentary classification, and several papers have been published which reflect the course of the discussions (1–8). Beginning with an explicit disavowal of allegiance to any one published system, the Group has considered the well-known schemes, both general and special, and the work being published by those in other countries who have also been studying the subject theoretically. It has not, unfortunately, had the opportunity so far of seeing the system developed in the U. S. S. R. on the basis of the philosophy of dialectical materialism.
While the Group has not been particularly satisfied with the development of the Colon Classification itself, we have nevertheless come to the conclusion that the method of facet analysis, first used systematically by S. R. Ranganathan, though sometimes occurring previously as it were by intuition, should form the basis of all forms of information retrieval.”

Douglas John Foskett

Foskett (1959) "The Construction of a Faceted Classification for a Special Subject" in: Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information. p. 867

Study , Country

“The work of the information officer [should be] regarded as the natural dynamic extension of that of the librarian.”

Douglas John Foskett

Palmer and Foskett (1958, p. 1495) as cited in: Alistair Black et al. (2012) The Early Information Society: Information Management in Britain Before the Computer. p. 41

Nature

“Facet analysis consists in an analysis of a subject in its entirety into a certain number of facets or categories of things; within each category, the subject headings enumerated all possess the same relationship vis-&-vis the subject in its entirety.”

Douglas John Foskett

Foskett Classification and indexing in Science, p. 42; As cited in: Eric de Grolier (1962) A study of general categories applicable to classification and coding in documentation http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0002/000250/025055eo.pdf. p. 15