Brian Campbell Vickery Quotes

British information theorist (1918–2009)

Brian Campbell Vickery (September 11, 1918 – October 17, 2009) was a British information scientist and classification researcher, and Professor and director at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London from 1973 to 1983.

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Alternative Names: B. C. Vickery • Brian C. Vickery

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Throughout life, all people are engaged in activities – practical or mental – trying to solve problems, activities that themselves give rise to problems. To solve these problems, people need knowledge. They can acquire this personal knowledge in two main ways. First, they can interrogate the world – natural and social – by means of closer observation, deeper analysis, controlled experiment, all forms of cognitive interaction. Second, they can enrich their personal knowledge by communicative interaction with the stock of public knowledge that mankind has built up over the millenia, thus acquiring what we may call information. The activities in which people engage also produce two other kinds of knowledge: that embodied in people (skills) and that embodied in their artefacts.

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...

Despite the fact that our profession constantly urges others to “consult the literature”, I do not think we are distinguished nowadays by knowledge of our heritage.

Information science is concerned with every aspect of the chain of information transfer activities, but the heart of its interest is information search.

User needs determine what functions should be provided, and different functions require different structures.

The crux of the retrieval problem is that selecting documents to read grows ever more difficult, and new techniques are continually needed.

Information retrieval is now an accepted part of the new discipline of information science and technology... I have concentrated on the field with which I am most familiar, the problems of bibliographic description and subject analysis.

[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

Citation does not necessarily reflect current demand.

Neither citation nor loan demand is an adequate measure of literature use by a large community. Each is only an indicator, illuminating some aspects of use but with its own inherent bias. The joint study of several indicators gives a more balanced picture..

Facet analysis results in more varied, multidimensional relationships, at least in theory, better reflecting the complexity of subject knowledge