Douglas John Foskett: Information

“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)

Idea , Knowledge

“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

“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

“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 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

Books , Quotes , History , Study

“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

“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