An appreciation - Brian Vickery

Citation

Meadows, J. (2010), "An appreciation - Brian Vickery", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 66 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2010.27866daa.002

An appreciation - Brian Vickery

Article Type: An appreciation - Brian Vickery Brian Vickery From: Journal of Documentation, Volume 66, Issue 4

The word “appreciation” means that I write from a personal viewpoint, rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive coverage of Brian’s life and work. I first came across the name “Brian Vickery” back in the 1960s. I had become interested in the study of what was later labelled “bibliometrics”. The relevant literature was then limited. One of the few items I came across was a paper by Brian in a 1948 issue of J.Doc. It was devoted to the law of scattering that Bradford had formulated a decade before. Bradford had formulated his law in two ways, and Brian showed that they did not agree. As I subsequently discovered, it was typical of Brian, then working in an industrial library, that he not only related an idea found in the literature to his own activities, but also, in doing so, spotted a mistake that others had missed. The popularity of this paper always amused Brian. This, his first research publication, proved to be both his most cited paper, and almost his only contribution to bibliometrics. One spin-off from my viewpoint was that it subsequently brought me into contact with him.

Brian’s early life in Australia had its complications. His father, Adam McCay, a well-known Australian journalist and poet, and his mother divorced while Brian was still a boy. His mother remarried when Brian was ten, and he took the name of his stepfather, Vickery. Brian ended his schooldays in England and went up to Oxford to read chemistry. Alongside science, he had a wide range of interests across the humanities. The list of recreations which he recorded many years later in Who’s Who – history, poetry, philosophy, music and theatre – already occupied him in his teens. Unfortunately, Oxford offered many distractions to such a person, and there was also the distraction of the war. The outcome for Brian was a not very distinguished degree. Since it was wartime, he was directed into a job – working in an explosives factory in Somerset. The factory had a large research laboratory, and Brian was put in charge of handling the information side. When the war ended, Brian became for a short time assistant editor of a chemical journal in London. During this period, he married an Irish girl, Ita McMenamin. By the time their daughter and son were born, he had moved to a new job as librarian at an ICI laboratory in Welwyn. There he learnt the basics of library and information work. As throughout his life, he mainly taught himself, but he also benefited from the internal ICI network, and from the resources of Aslib. He was beginning to establish himself in the profession when the Royal Society Conference on Scientific Information was organised in 1948. Brian was pulled in to act as secretary to one of the sections. He was never sure in later years whether this conference deserved the fame it achieved, but he certainly valued the contacts that he made there – not least, with Bernal and Urquhart (Bernal’s book on The Social Function of Science, published just before the war, was a source of inspiration for him.)

After the conference, Bernal was asked to form a committee to look at the problems of classification. Brian was asked to suggest experts on the topic from the library world. The outcome in 1952 was the formation of the Classification Research Group. The Group, and Brian’s input, has subsequently played an important role in discussing ideas of classification, and not only in the library world. Thus, a microbiologist friend of mine told me that he found the discussions useful in developing his own work. Brian’s involvement led him to publish in 1958 his first book – Classification and Indexing in Science – which went through three editions. Brian believed that 1958 marked a turning point in his career. He was invited to attend the International Conference on Scientific Information held that year in Washington (as famous, in its way, as the 1948 conference). This increased his interest in the problems of information retrieval, and encouraged him to publish a book On Retrieval System Theory in 1961, which soon went into a second edition. It also led Donald Urquhart, another British participant in the meeting, to suggest that Brian should join him in setting up the new National Lending Library (NLL) at Boston Spa. The appointment of Brian as his deputy was a shrewd move on Donald’s part. Donald was not a librarian, and his innovative ideas for running the NLL were regarded with some suspicion by many librarians. Brian, however, was generally accepted as more or less a librarian. This seemed to surprise him, both at the time and in retrospect: perhaps because he saw the archetypal librarian as someone working in a public library. To others, it was less surprising; he was, after all, now seen as an expert on classification, and Cat. & Class have always been regarded as an essential background for all librarians. In addition, Brian was easy to get on with, whereas Donald could be more abrasive. Consequently, Brian was able to provide a librarian-friendly face for NLL, while, at the same time, both supporting Donald’s plans and admiring his abilities. It is hardly surprising that Donald said Brian was the one person he wanted as his deputy – an accolade of which Brian was justly proud.

In the mid-1960s, Brian was appointed Librarian of UMIST (now a part of Manchester University). Though he had all the skills needed, it was not an ideal post for him, for it offered little scope for his interest in the theoretical aspects of information handling. During the same period, he met his second wife, Alina Gralewska, who, as the name suggests, was of Polish origin. I never met Brian’s first wife, but I knew Alina. She was a considerable contrast to Brian – an ebullient personality, capable of expressing her opinions forcefully. Her interest in automated information handling overlapped with Brian’s, and her influence on his later research activities is clear. In 1966, Brian moved to a more congenial post at Aslib, taking charge of the Research & Consultancy Department there. Those were stirring days for information research. For the first time, grants became regularly available, initially from the Office for Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) and then from its successor body the British Library R&D Department (BLRDD). The department at Aslib flourished and expanded, having some of the best researchers and most entertaining characters in the information world. The research emphasis in the Department, which concentrated on applicable rather than abstract research, well-suited Brian’s own approach. He found time at Aslib to produce two more books, along with a paper – “Structure and function in retrieval languages” – which was later pinpointed as one of the most influential papers to be published in J.Doc.

Brian’s stay at Aslib ended in 1973, when he was invited to take charge of the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London (UCL). This was the oldest school of librarianship in the country; “Archive” had been added shortly after the Second World War, and “Information” was a more recent addition still. UCL in those days typically decided what sort of person they wanted as a professor and then looked round for a suitable candidate. Input from the department concerned was not always regarded as essential, even when the incoming professor was also going to act as head of department. Brian’s publications record was strong, and “information” was thought to be an up-and-coming area., so his appointment was hardly surprising, even though other good candidates were on the short-list. The problem was that he was taking over a department, which had had some difficulties in the past – the previous Head had not been a librarian – and where certain senior colleagues had expected to be in the running for the Head-of-Department post. So, he initially faced a fairly tense situation. The problems gradually resolved themselves with time, but they reinforced Brian’s distaste for academic politics, a distaste which he did not entirely conceal. This had some disadvantages for the department. Then, as now, involvement by the Head of Department in the wider college scene could help ensure that the department was not forgotten when it came to the distribution of academic goodies. He enjoyed the teaching and research, if not the administration – though he introduced the first staff meetings in the Department – and continued to get grants from BLRDD, building up his own research group. I was on the advisory committee for one of his long-term projects – the use of modelling techniques to investigate the dynamics of library and information systems – and appreciated both his research insights and his capable handling of meetings. Alina had been appointed to a senior post in information systems for London University, and the two of them began to develop the research interests that they had in common. Thus, they were both called in as consultants when the Shah of Iran decided to set up a grandiose national information centre. Nothing came of the project, but Brian found it an amusing experience. Brian was one amongst many advisers on that project, but, shortly afterwards, he was called in as the sole adviser to a House of Commons Select Committee set up to investigate the current state of information storage and retrieval. Brian enjoyed the experience, though it was later remarked to me, by someone involved, that he seemed to be much too nice a man to mix with politicians.

Brian retired from UCL in 1983 when he was 65. He immediately became involved in Alina’s work – developing an expert system for use with referral. This was initially a BLRDD-supported project, but subsequently developed into a commercial venture. Brian seemed not altogether happy with this change, though he put a good deal of work into the project in the 1980s. When it came to R&D, his interest was with the “R”, rather than the “D”. Nor did he regard himself as a businessman. Consequently, he was more sorry for Alina’s sake, than for his own, when the venture was closed down in the early 1990s. During the 1980s, he was also working on something closer to his heart – a book devoted to exploring the basic ideas and activities of information science. Information Science in Theory and Practice reflected Brian’s personal approach to the subject: wide-ranging – because “information” cropped up everywhere – but with theory and practice always closely intertwined. Though Brian did most of the writing, he discussed the contents with Alina, and it was therefore agreed he should add her name as co-author. The reviews were good, and the book was widely recommended to students, going through three editions. Towards the end of the last century, Brian got down to writing his final book. This was on a topic, Scientific Communication in History, which had occupied his mind from his early days. He had always had an interest in Marxist philosophy, and considered Bernal’s writings to provide an excellent example how an overview such as this should be put together.

My last contact with Brian was over a collected set of essays published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Institute of Information Scientists, of which body he had been a founding member. His worry, he said, was that new generations of information scientists might forget some of the valuable insights that had been established in the early days. For example, he strongly believed that researchers must always involve the relevant user group when carrying out investigations into their needs. (It was this point that led him to criticise the TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) experiments, since he believed that “real” users should have been involved.) These essays appeared in book form only months before Brian’s death, so he remained in harness to the end. He was, in summary, one of the pioneers of information science, and played a significant role in its development for decades. Over and above this, he was a man with a wide range of interests and an admirable ability to get on with all sorts and conditions of people, though it took time to know him well. I would like to conclude by thanking Ia McIlwaine and Susan O’Halloran, Brian’s daughter, for their advice.

Jack Meadows