“Scientific information is faced with the following problem. On the one hand, we have the world’s literature of science and technology, past and present, in many languages; on the other, and enquirer with a question. How to select, from a vast mass of words, the few that are the most closely relevant to an enquiry? It is this selection process that makes use of classification.”

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 3.

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Brian Campbell Vickery 84
British information theorist 1918–2009

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