Jack Mills 1918-2010

ISKO UK is sorry to announce the death of Jack Mills, on 9 July 2010, at his home in London, at the age of 91.

Jack had a long and distinguished career as a professional librarian, academic, teacher and researcher, and, for the last 40 years, as Editor of the Bliss Bibliographic Classification, Second Edition (BC2).

In recent years his work had been marked by the award of an Honorary Fellowship of CILIP, and the Tony Keny Strix award for services to information retrieval. He was also honoured by the (then) American Society for Information Science as one of a handful of British information professionals nominated as 'Pioneers of Information Science'.

His death was unexpected and peaceful, sitting in his garden at home, and, as usual, he had been working on BC2 during the day. A fuller tribute will appear on the ISKO UK website, and in the Knowledge Organization journal.

Professor Brian Vickery 1918 - 2009

We are very sorry to announce the death of Professor Brian Vickery on October 17th 2009, shortly after his 91st birthday.

Brian was an enormously influential figure in the field of classification and information retrieval, a powerful force in the development of faceted classification and retrieval theory, and a prolific writer and researcher throughout his life. A founder member of the Classification Research Group, he served as a practising librarian, research director at Aslib, and Director of the School of Library and Archive Studies at UCL (1973 - 1983).

He was made an honorary member of ISKO UK in 2008 to acknowledge his tremendous contribution to our field. ISKO UK members will feel privileged to have heard the masterly address he gave at the June 2008 meeting. A fuller appreciation will appear at the ISKO UK website shortly.

• Issues in Information Retrieval (June 2008) - talk recording (mp3)
• Brian Vickery's website
• In Pioneers of Information Science