Computer Scientists From The United Kingdom

"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."

"A retrieval system can be studied at three levels:"

"# The way in which units of information, and relevant relations between them, are defined in the system. This is the semantic level of subject analysis."

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

"Four years ago, when the first edition of this book was written, information retrieval was beginning to crystallize out as a unified discipline. The process has gone further today. Several other books... have also offered a general survey, although each has contributed its own special emphasis. Many conferences on the subject have been held, and a constant stream of new articles has appeared, both in documentation journals and in those in the data processing field. Information retrieval is now recognized as a discipline, and further advances in theory are being made, What I described in the first edition as the key operation in retrieval — the subject description of documents — is being explored theoretically and experimentally, although we are still a long way from reducing this operation to rule (Chapter 3). There has been less new work on the design of descriptor languages, although ideas on the display of descriptor relations through thesauri and 'semantic maps' have been developed (Chapter 4). Access to files has been examined, particularly by those experienced in data processing."

"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."

"Systems transfer or transform materials, energy or information - and usually all three. An information system is one whose prime function is to transfer or transform information: the telephone system is an obvious example. This book concentrates on certain types of information system: those concerned with the transfer of information between specialists, mainly with reference to their work, and mainly based on documents. The focus is thus on specialised documentary information systems."

"The areas traditionally concerned with such systems are: publishing in all its ramification, librarianship, bibliography, documentation, record management, archives and the like. Systematic study of the activities in all these areas has lead to increased recognition of their common features. They are all concerned with information systems, and their study may include in the wider field of 'information science and technology' (as the Americans put it) or 'informatics' (as Soviet writers would have it)."

"An information system is an organisation of people, materials and machines that serves to facilitate the transfer of information from one person to another. Its function is social: to aid human communication. If we take this to mean all reception of signals by the human senses (sight, sound, small, touch, taste,...)- then communication is an incessant and essential accompaniment of all human activity. If we restrict the meaning of signals to flowing between people, much of the daily life of most of us is occupied by such interpersonal acts."

"We communicate with each other to inform, to instruct, to persuade, to amuse, to annoy. Informing and instructing aim to alter the receiver's concepts, whereas persuading, amusing or annoying aim to change his preferences or feelings. In a work situation people do make jokes and enemies, and use the arts of persuasion, but much of their communication has an informal or instructional aspect."

"”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]."

"In its whole sweep, therefore, information work includes: science, that helps us to understand our problems; technology, that helps us to solve them; and the art of participating in each delicate interpersonal communication into which we are invited. The fusion of these three aspects of the craft creates a “triple glow” of optimal service."

"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."

"… it is most important – particularly in an immature field like information science - to accept that all modes of study and all analytical methods can make useful contributions, and not to denigrate [qualitative] models as “just description”"

"The field of study [of information science] is so wide and varied; research is necessarily restricted to accessible areas; it often (and rightly) has the practical aim of providing guidance in a specific situation, rather than searching for generalisations; the isolation of variables for investigation is often so difficult; rarely can confirmatory experiments be undertaken."

"Documentation is a practice concerned with all the processes involved in transferring documents from sources to users."

"In the past, documentation has frequently been compared with librarianship, with some argument as to which comprehends the other. The field is more helpfully characterised if we take its scope to be all forms of document (i.e. any physical carrier of symbolic messages) and all aspects of their handling, from production to delivery. The document system then becomes very much wider than conventional librarianship – it includes publication and printing, distribution, some forms of telecommunication, analysis, storage, retrieval and delivery to the user."

"The representation of knowledge in symbolic form is a matter that has pre-occupied the world of documentation since its origin. The problem is now relevant in many situations other than documents and indexes. The structure of records and files in databases: data structures in computer programming; the syntactic and semantic structure of natural language; knowledge representation in artificial intelligence; models of human memory: in all these fields it is necessary to decide how knowledge may be represented so that the representations may be manipulated."

"In seeking scientific understanding of the processes of information transfer we have had to go considerably outside the subject limits within which 'information science' as an academic subject is normally constrained... It has become increasingly clear that only by widening its “knowledge base” can information science establish a solid foundation for future development."

"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."

"It is with this whole cycle [between generation and use of information] that information science is now concerned."

"The term “information science” first appeared in the guise of “information scientist”. Particularly in industry during recent decades, some qualified scientists moved out of research, development of production into a new occupational role, that of providing an active information service to their colleagues. They regarded themselves as “information” scientists rather than “research” scientists. As this kind of work expanded and became formalized the need was seen to provide training for those who would enter the occupation. In time, the content of this training came to be called 'information science'."

"The scientific study of the communication of information in society – “information science” in the sense of an academic discipline..."

"It is essential to stress that information science is not solely concerned with science information, nor indeed only with the provision of information to academic and professional workers, but with all forms of information transfer in society."

"Information systems, at any level of complexity above that of speech, necessarily involve technologies such as printing, telecommunications, or computers. However, to information science technical potentialities and constraints are of importance mainly in that they affect the social relations concerned."

"[There has been] a widening of the field covered by the concept of “information”, both its theory and its practice. Information transfer has been put on a par with the transfer of matter and energy, as one of the primary natural processes.’"

"The development of information research has increased considerably the interaction of emerging information science with other disciplines. Librarianship has traditionally had links with education and classification and has drawn ideas from logic and philosophy. But during the last fifty years new insights and methods have been derived from sociology and social psychology, from computer science, from operations research and related quantitative approaches, from communications research, from linguistics, and most recently from the new hybrids: cognitive science and artificial intelligence."

"The old-established groups in the information profession... have come to recognise that many other social groups are concerned with information transfer."

"The principles of information science apply, whatever the medium of transfer."

"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."

""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."

"My first encounter with the concept of "information service" came with the reading of The Social Function of Science by Desmond Bernal, first published in 1939-a work that stimulated a whole generation of young scientists to think about the role of science in society, its organisation, its future. In it, he wrote that in every laboratory "there should be someone deputed to watch the whole of current literature for items which might be relevant to the work of the laboratory, and to be able to indicate without loss of time where such items are likely to be found." Such a person "would have to be chosen partly for his comprehensive scientific interests, which need to be much greater than those of the other laboratory workers, and partly for his inclination to systematic thinking." Already I felt that I might be suited to such a role."

"After my first encounter with in the Patent Office, and subsequent use of the (UDC) for the Akers library, I became increasingly interested in problems of information organisation for retrieval. My first paper in the field was "The Structure of a Connective Index" (Vickery, 1950)."

"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."

"Bertie Brookes and I shared a common view that, beyond the practical activities of information provision, there could be discerned a more general science of information. He tended towards a mathematical formulation of this: I was more interested in its social aspects."

"Varied views were put forward as to the content and priorities of information science, though there was general agreement that its central topics should be information organisation, dissemination and retrieval."

"Theoretical research in information science is still marked by a tendency to play safe... it is still marked by timidity. It could now afford to be more boldly speculative, intellectually exciting and therefore more attractive to intelligent and ambitious students." Have things changed?"

"Our profession is concerned with three "aspects of the world". First, how people behave when they feel a need for information; second, characteristics of documentary information that constrain how we can manipulate it; and third, characteristics of the physical media that carry the information, whether they be static books or dynamic electronic networks."

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

"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."

"Only in a very static profession can one be trained to slot in immediately to an available job, and our profession is far from static. It is more beneficial for the students to give them a generalised grounding in a wide variety of professional activities and concerns, so that they will have some background knowledge for no matter what job is first available. For those who seek it, our subject also has its cultural value, which can contribute to a general education."

"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."

"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."

"Information practice... consists of two activities that we may call diagnosis and prevention. Diagnosis is identifying what is the most probable information need of a user in a particular state of information want. Provision is deciding what action is most likely to meet that need. Information science seeks to understand the potential range of user situations giving rise to information want and needs; to develop methods of identifying the actual information needed; to understand and expand the range of possible ways of satisfying information need; and to develop methods of deciding what way is most likely to be effective in a particular case."

"Information practice is concerned with facilitating the interaction between knowledge seekers – through channels – with knowledge (personal and recorded). Stepping back from practice, we may see the role of the science as exploring the characteristics of people and their “information behaviour”, the features of knowledge records of every kind, the variety of channels (oral, written, printed, graphic, digital) that may be used to transmit information, and how the three elements interact."

"[The particular concern of the information scientist] is with the process as a whole – the interaction between the three elements [information behaviour, records, channels] that leads to people becoming informed."

"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 and technology are now so closely linked that analysis and experiment lead quickly on to invention, to the introduction of new channels (and documents)."

"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."