Douglas John Foskett

The work of the information officer [should be] regarded as the natural dynamic extension of that of the librarian.

— Douglas John Foskett

After a great deal of (quite valuable) discussion, the British accepted that ‘facet analysis’ must be the basis of a classification scheme able to meet the modern requirements.

— Douglas John Foskett

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.

— Douglas John Foskett

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

— Douglas John Foskett

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.

— Douglas John Foskett

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

— Douglas John Foskett

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.

— Douglas John Foskett

[The 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.

— Douglas John Foskett

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.

— Douglas John Foskett

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.

— Douglas John Foskett

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

— Douglas John Foskett

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.

— Douglas John Foskett

The same thing can be identified by many different terms, and the same term may mean many different things.

— Douglas John Foskett

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

— Douglas John Foskett

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.

— Douglas John Foskett

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.

— Douglas John Foskett

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.

— Douglas John Foskett