“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)

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Brian Campbell Vickery84
British information theorist 1918–2009

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“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 (1918–2009) British information theorist

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

“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 (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 11.

“Information systems, at any level of complexity above that of speech, necessarily involve technologies such as printing, telecommunications, or computers. However, to information science technical potentialities and constraints are of importance mainly in that they affect the social relations concerned.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 14.

“Every large-scale system is an information system. The automatic factory, the vehicular-traffic system, any military system- in the design of all these systems, primary attention should be given to the flow of information about the elements of the system.”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

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“Treating cartography as a formal communication system implies that we can improve map communication if we can reduce the filtering or loss of information at various points in the system where in the system should have a positive effect, and an information loss should be impossible to overcome. Most efforts to study cartographic communication have been directed to the middle stages in the system: the cartographer's transformation of selected information into the map and the initial extraction of information from the map by the user.”

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“An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it… Where an information retrieval system tends not to be used, a more capable information retrieval system may tend to be used even less.”

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“[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 (1918–2009) British information theorist

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

“The old-established groups in the information profession… have come to recognise that many other social groups are concerned with information transfer.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Fifty years of information progress (1994), p. 7; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

“General systems theory is a set of related definitions, assumptions, and propositions which deal with reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy. General systems behavior is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones.
Even more basic to this presentation than the concept of "system" are the concepts of "space," "time," "matter," "energy," and "information," because the living systems which I shall discuss exist in space and are made of matter and energy organized by information.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Source: Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969), p. 51; Opening paragraph

“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 (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 330; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

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