8 quotes
Looking back, I ask myself why so little of the basic research has had an impact on professional practice.
A Long Search for Information (2004)
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.
A Long Search for Information (2004)
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.
A Long Search for Information (2004)
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.
A Long Search for Information (2004)
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.
A Long Search for Information (2004)
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.
A Long Search for Information (2004)
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.
A Long Search for Information (2004)
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.
A Long Search for Information (2004)