Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes

# The physical mechanisms (hardware) in which the structure is embodied.

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.

"We do not encourage initiative," said the factory manager. "What you must do is to learn to work to the safety rules." It was my first day in my first job, as a plant chemist in an explosives factory, located in the English countryside, in July 1941. Happily, he was quite wrong. We were not making some old, tried and tested explosive like nitroglycerine or TNT. It was the first large -scale production of a brand-new chemical, code-named RDX-Research Department eXplosive-developed by a government military research department.

All the elements of the process of “becoming informed”... are of interest to investigators other than “information scientists”… The totality of activity related to information today is necessarily a multidisciplinary exercise.

”Information science” emerges (a) when conceptual explorations, not directed towards immediate practical or technical ends, begin to take place, and (b) they are seen to be concerned with a definable area of interest [that of facilitating the transmission of information between people].

Citation does not necessarily reflect current demand.

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.

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.

There does seem to be among some members of our profession a rather desperate search for a "fundamental theory of information", which leads them to attempt to derive our practice from disciplines such as epistemology, or hermeneutics, or discourse analysis, or semiotics, or even "cybersemiotics". Their derivations rarely make adequate contact with the realities of information practice … The theory of a science should spring from deep immersion in its practice.

The basic rules of classification are - Each characteristic of division must produce at least two classes - Only one principle of division must be used at a time, to produce mutually exclusive classes. - The species of any genius must be completely exhaustive of their parent class.

The structure if a fully developed classification can be technically described in the following way:

[Vickery in his handbook of procedures for making , writes that organizing a field into facets] can be achieved only by a detailed examination of the literature of the field

# The general structural features of the system considered as a network of units of information linked to each other and to documentary items. This may be called structural analysis.

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.

The service professions such as medicine and teaching have proud and age-old traditions. Only relatively recently have we realised that serving people's information needs can be as socially valuable as looking after their health and educational needs.