Douglas John Foskett Quotes

We define a fruitful partnership between our twin professions of librarian and information systems scientist in support of this adventure in creativity, and the pursuit of wisdom? If it is the nature of the creative mind that it sets out to grapple with the tensions and contradictions in the "paradigm", as Kuhn calls it, it follows that first of all one must know what the paradigm is.

Most librarians of his age were bookmen, who loved the touch, the appearance and the smell of books, and who often formed their own collections. Douglas fitted that description; we were all proud to be called ‘Librarians’. Perhaps modern information professionals are similarly inspired by the computer and the world-wide web. But the 1970s was a decade when computer technologies were assuming ever-growing importance for the future of libraries, and Douglas Foskett, as much as anyone, anticipated their value and fostered their introduction. He had already written extensively on classification, and had been a founder member of a special Classification Group. Such publications as ‘Classification and indexing in the social sciences’ and ‘Science, humanism and libraries’, which appeared in the 1960s are still important texts today, despite the vast deluge of literature on information management which has been published since. Of course, times and practices have changed radically in university libraries in the past twenty-five years, with the explosion of technology, and the continuous growth in all digital products and services. There have also been changes in social attitudes and in the approach to work. For example, when Douglas, in his final post, introduced the first computer system (GEAC) in the University of London Library, the junior staff went on strike! Such a response would be unthinkable today.

All information services are ultimately based on library methods and materials.

Scientists are more profitably occupied at the bench that in the library

Information retrieval consists of four main stages: Identifying the exact subject of the search; Locating this subject in a guide which refers the searcher to one or more documents; Locating the documents; Locating the required information in the documents.

No one has ever devised a completely satisfactory classification scheme, and it seems unlikely that anyone ever will. This failing has always been apparent, but in recent years it has taken on increasingly urgent importance as scholarly literature has grown more complex and information retrieval more sophisticated. The library profession has long been aware of the difficulties created by the schemes available, but Foskett, librarian at the University of London's Institute of Education, has now examined the matter thoroughly in specific relation to the social sciences. He has written an immensely stimulating book, providing a perceptive critique of each of the existing classifications as well as new insight into possible solutions to the problems of classifying social science materials. He is very much in the Ranganathan camp and believes that the "facet analysis" which Ranganathan devised can conceivably supply the key to a much improved classification. He is especially taken with the more refined versions of this approach found in the work of the British Classification Research Group, ,and particularly in the work of Barbara Kyle. A schedule fashioned along these lines, he believes, would reveal subject. subdivisions and the relationships between subjects much more satisfactorily than any schedule used today. He would have a classification of such flexibility that any two concepts in the area of the social sciences could be related and this relation indicated in the notation of the material.

After six years of war service, I rejoined Ilford Public Library service in 1946, and set about completing my F.L.A., begun in 1940. This service had a good tradition of assistance to readers, and when I joined the Metal Box C. in 1948, I soon realised how the skills required for a scientific and industrial research “information officer” depended on the basic techniques of librarianship, notably classification and cataloguing. The enhancement of these led to the development of higher levels, in literature searching, and, more particularly, in current awareness service and selective dissemination of information.... Meeting with S. R. Ranganathan in 1948 gave me a new view of classification as facet analysis plus traditional generic analysis and I applied this in schemes for Packaging, Occupational Safety and Health, and Education. This experience has suggested to me that facet analysis applied to any subject can reveal hitherto uncoordinated concepts - materials, processes, etc – and thus offer an indication of possible areas of future research. This could be a unique Information Science to the World Wide Web.

The work of the information officer [should be] regarded as the natural dynamic extension of that of the librarian.

Classification is thought of by many librarians as either a fearful complication of a very simply act, or an outmoded, almost prehistoric, method of doing a very complex mathematical task.

D. J. Foskett is the author of several special ‘faceted’ classification systems of which three, at least, have been published. He was, with A. J. Wells, one of the first to introduce Ranganathan’s ideas into England. The Metal Box Company’s classification system comprises six ‘facets’ (categories), of which four relate to the manufacture of boxes (products, parts, materials, operations) and two for packing and crating (packed and crated products-and material condition of the latter; processes). ‘Various common subdivisions’ are also added : research, development, instruments, control, special operations (welding, stamping, etc.). The classification established for the food industries being an extension of the CC, utilizes the latter’s categories, but refines their meaning: ‘personality’ becomes products; ‘material’ becomes parts, on the one hand, and materials, on the other; ‘energy’ becomes operations. The most important of the classifications compiled by Foskett is the one on health and occupational safety, of which the schedules were first published as an appendix to the proceedings of the Dorking Conference, then continued, modified and completed to serve as a classification for the International Information Centre for Occupational Safety and Health in Geneva...

The CRG turned its thoughts towards a much more complex matter that had received little attention from any of the other schools of thought which had been represented at the two Conferences [Dorking and ICSI]. This is the relation between general and special classifications: is there anything to be gained by pursuing the ideal of a new universal classification scheme, and if so, how will the specialist's need be served by it? How can the CRG schemes, for example, that prove so satisfactory for their users, be integrated into such a general scheme?

It was a dramatic moment in the history of our civilisation when, in about the year 240 B.C., Archimedes leapt out of his bath and ran naked into the street of Syracuse shouting "Eureka" - "I have found it!" He had found the theoretical answer to a practical problem, that of finding the specific gravity of solids, known ever since as "Archimedes' Principle". We know this because Archimedes had written and published many books, on mathematics and mechanics, and some of these have survived and are preserved in libraries for us to use today. He made a major contribution to the progress of humanity, and over the centuries, that progress has been continually stimulated and accelerated by the invention of new theories, new tools and machines, which explain our world, and lighten the burden of securing the basic necessities of life.

consists in an analysis of a subject in its entirety into a certain number of facets or categories of things; within each category, the subject headings enumerated all possess the same relationship vis-&-vis the subject in its entirety.

In all this, I have made no mention of punched cards and all the other hardware. The CRG would have been hard put to it to ignore this, even if it had wanted to, which it does not. We believe, however, that there will, in the foreseeable future, remain a need for classification to provide research workers with the opportunity for browsing and for imposing some discipline on a literature that tends always towards greater disorder. We believe that, since hundreds of millions of dollars and rubles are being spent on hardware, and fat volumes roll off the presses almost day and night, that ten shillings a year that the CRG collects from its members will not be missed.

Douglas developed a strong interest in the relations between education and classification. He explored the writings of L.S Vygotsky, L. von Bertalanffy (for systems theory), and J.K. Feibleman and wrote a number of articles on classification and integrative levels.