Douglas John Foskett

“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.”

“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), {{w|Joseph Needham}} and J.K. Feibleman and wrote a number of articles on classification and integrative levels.”

“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).”

“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.”

“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.”

“The aim of an information service is to organise the literature on a systematic basis in order to save the time of research workers.”

“Classification is thought of by many librarians as either a fearful complication of a very simply act, or an outmoded, almost prehistoric, method of doing a very complex mathematical task.”

“The CRG turned its thoughts towards a much more complex matter that had received little attention from any of the other schools of thought which had been represented at the two Conferences [Dorking and ICSI]. This is the relation between general and special classifications: is there anything to be gained by pursuing the ideal of a new universal classification scheme, and if so, how will the specialist's need be served by it? How can the CRG schemes, for example, that prove so satisfactory for their users, be integrated into such a general scheme?”

“During... ten years the C.R.G. has met nearly every month, and although it has never had more than about a dozen active members, its influence has grown to the point at which is causes Mortimer Taube in America to rage over its medieval scholasticism, John Metcalfe in Australia to denounce it as a plot by Ranganathan to ruin librarianship, and a British University librarian to describe it as one of the two most significant developments in British librarianship since the end of the war.”

“[The {{w|Classification Research Group}} was] a typical British affair, with no resources beyond the native wit of its members, no allegiance to any existing system of classification, no fixed target, no recognition by the British Government (naturally), and at first only an amused tolerance from the library profession.”

“In 1948, it was agreed that a study of classification should be made, and a committee of scientists was appointed under the leadership of Professor. J. D. Bernal.”

“All information services are ultimately based on library methods and materials.”

“Since books are not their primary source materials, as they are for research in the humanities, most scientists prefer to spend their time on experiments and not on reading.”

“Scientists are more profitably occupied at the bench that in the library”

“{{w|Facet analysis}} consists in an analysis of a subject in its entirety into a certain number of facets or categories of things; within each category, the subject headings enumerated all possess the same relationship vis-&-vis the subject in its entirety.”

“After a great deal of (quite valuable) discussion, the British {{w|Classification Research Group}} accepted that ‘facet analysis’ must be the basis of a classification scheme able to meet the modern requirements.”