Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes

Information science is identified as... the study of the communication of information in society. This meaning is only beginning to emerge from its practical background, the social activity of facilitating information transfer.

Varied views were put forward as to the content and priorities of information science, though there was general agreement that its central topics should be information organisation, dissemination and retrieval.

An information retrieval system is therefore defined here as any device which aids access to documents specified by subject, and the operations associated with it. The documents can be books, journals, reports, atlases, or other records of thought, or any parts of such records—articles, chapters, sections, tables, diagrams, or even particular words. The retrieval devices can range from a bare list of contents to a large digital computer and its accessories. The operations can range from simple visual scanning to the most detailed programming.

I suspect that teaching the history of our subject is less frequent in our institutions than it was. We are getting short-sighted both in looking forward and in looking backward, to our detriment.

Perhaps an underlying cause [of doubt as to the future of information science] is in some cases... the apprehension that information science may become “submerged” in the larger field of computer science.

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 . The Conference papers opened up all kinds of new information vistas - in many ways setting the agenda for the ensuing development of the field. I met many interesting people - some who stand out in the memory are Peter Luhn, , 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...

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.

# The way in which units of information, and relevant relations between them, are defined in the system. This is the semantic level of subject analysis.

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.

[Information] science and technology are now so closely linked that analysis and experiment lead quickly on to invention, to the introduction of new channels (and documents).

The analogy with bibliographic classifications and thesauri is obvious... despite the differences, it is to be regretted that 'ontological engineers' make little or no reference to work in information science. As a consequence, they do not appear to draw at all on the rich experience of constructing knowledge schedules … or... developing concept lexicons.

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.

Four years ago, when the first edition of this book was written, information retrieval was beginning to crystallize out as a unified discipline. The process has gone further today. Several other books... have also offered a general survey, although each has contributed its own special emphasis. Many conferences on the subject have been held, and a constant stream of new articles has appeared, both in documentation journals and in those in the data processing field. Information retrieval is now recognized as a discipline, and further advances in theory are being made, What I described in the first edition as the key operation in retrieval — the subject description of documents — is being explored theoretically and experimentally, although we are still a long way from reducing this operation to rule (Chapter 3). There has been less new work on the design of descriptor languages, although ideas on the display of descriptor relations through thesauri and 'semantic maps' have been developed (Chapter 4). Access to files has been examined, particularly by those experienced in data processing.

The scope of a specialised documentary classification is usually designated by its title, the subject field that it professes to classify. It is no easy task to state what is meant by a subject field. In general it can be expressed as Thing-Activity. A definable group of things... is selected, and from the many relations in which they subsist a certain number are selected as relevant.

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