Library and information science research

摘要

Brian Vickery's 33-page monograph in the University of Illinois occasional papers series gives a reflective account of his professional life, and his views on the information professions, and the research and teaching which supports them. It is an interesting and insightful account, touching on many of the events and personalities of the information world since the 1940s, with a strong emphasis on the UK setting, and Vickery does not shrink from some honest criticisms where he feels them to be justified. Like many others of his generation, Vickery moved into library work almost accidentally from scientific laboratory work, and, like a remarkable number of leading scientific librarians and information scientists, began life as a chemist. Why there should be such a strong link between a starting point in chemistry and a subsequent interest in recorded information is not clear. Michael Lynch suggested to me, when he interviewed me as a newly qualified organic chemist seeking to join the Sheffield School, that it was because familiarity with the grammar of structural representations of organic compounds led to a natural interest in information handling; this sounded so erudite that I readily agreed with him. With the lamentable decline of chemistry as a university subject, in the UK at least, any such link is now hardly significant.