Brian Campbell Vickery

1918–2009 · British information theorist

Topics: learning, software design, databases

• In scientific information, then, we find that subjects - the themes and topics on which books and articles are written - cluster into fields, each of which can be analysed into its characteristic set of facets of terms.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• There is as yet no unified theory of retrieval systems, and a good deal of retrieval practice is still an empirical art, unsullied by theory.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• 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..

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• 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.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

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

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• For the profession as a whole, it is necessary that our hard-won understanding of our discipline be handed on to the next generation in a formal way.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• The structural tools developed by the profession – hierarchical classifications, facets, thesaural relations, topic maps, the predicates used in ontology – will still be of use, provided that they can in each case pass a test of utility.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• Looking back, I ask myself why so little of the basic research has had an impact on professional practice.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

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

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• 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.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• Classification in its simplest terms, means putting together things or ideas that are alike, and keeping separate those that are different.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• The problems of subject search on the Internet are no different in principle: search engines may permit easy location of verbally expressed topics, but we still seek to improve our methods of navigation.

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

• [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).

  — Brian Campbell Vickery

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

  — Brian Campbell Vickery