Top 15 Douglas John Foskett Quotes

Douglas Foskett was an outstanding librarian, well known in Britain and overseas. He was one of the thinkers of the library profession, and although devoted to books as such he was also among the first to recognise the potential of automated systems.

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.

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.

The 1950s to early 1960s saw the publication of three major works on indexing, which between them span the retrieval problems of the whole spectrum of knowledge... The first was Vickery’s Classification and indexing in science (1958), followed by Foskett’s Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963) and finally Langridge’s Classification and indexing in the humanities (1976). These three works, though designed principally as textbooks, expound many universal principles as well as highlighting the specific problems that the various groups of disciplines present and the solutions that have been adopted.

One of the most prominent figures in contemporary British library and information science, Douglas John Foskett made many, varied, and important contributions to library and information science. Classification was always one of Foskett's major interests, and in 1952 he was one of the founders of the Classification Research Group in Britain. But he proved equally influential in the fields of comparative librarianship and library education and in the development of the Library Association (LA).

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.

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 discovery of new knowledge for ourselves, then, means the assimilation of public information into our unique context of thought. ie can establish relations between ideas and concepts which are not available to anyone else, because no-one else has precisely the same system of information available.

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.

Few inventions have had so rapid and wide-ranging effects as the various machines which now process data and information by electronic energy. But I hope and believe that even these remarkable engines will not supersede the book as an instrument for the transfer of information. I remain sceptical, particularly when I see the advocates of the paperless society and the electronic library writing large books to support their case. I earnestly hope and believe also that libraries, as the records and memory of humanity, can form a fruitful partnership with the latest tools invented to ease the burden of our labour. Provided that these tools are efficiently operated by well-thought-out systems for organising and retrieving information, they offer the possibilities and opportunities for librarians and information specialists in all types of institution to meet the challenges of the new millennium.

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.

The purpose of a classification scheme is to arrange information, in documents on shelves or on cards in indexes, in a sequence that will be helpful to the user.

The retrieval process begins when a lack of information shows itself in a human mind and the decision is taken to find out if this information has been discovered and published

The same thing can be identified by many different terms, and the same term may mean many different things.

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.