S. C. Bradford
S. C. Bradford (1878–1948) was an influential British librarian.
Life
Samuel Clement Bradford was born on January 10, 1878 in London. He joined the staff of the South Kensington Museum in 1899, being in the library from 1901 onwards. He worked at this time in what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum. During 1911-14 he was in charge of the chemistry collections in addition to his work in the library. During the First World War he was lent first to the National Physical Laboratory and then to the Chemical Warfare Department. He became chief librarian of the Science Library in 1925, with the rank of keeper from 1930 to 1925–1937. He died on November 13, 1948.
Contributions
Bradford aggressively increased the size and importance of the Science Museum library, seeking to make it national resource.
He strongly supported the development of documentation, promoted the use of the Universal Decimal Classification, co-founded the British Society for International Bibliography with Alan Pollard as a "daughter society" of the FID and edited its Proceedings.
He discovered "Bradford's Law of Scattering," a statistical pattern in the dispersion of articles on a given topic across journal titles. This is one of the three traditional bibliometric patterns along with obsolescence and Lotka's Law.
Publications
- "A short account of the Science Library and the Science Museum, South Kensington." Aslib Proceedings 1 (1924): 27-29. [1]
- "Sources of information on specific subjects." Reprinted in the Journal of Information Science 10, no. 4 (April 1, 1985): 176–180.
- Documentation. London, C. Lockwood, 1948. 2nd ed., with an introduction by Jesse H. Shera and Margaret Egan. London, C. Lockwood, 1953.
Further reading
- Pledge, H. T. "Dr. S. C. Bradford." Nature 162, no. 4128 (Dec 11, 1948): 917–918.
- "Recollections of a colleague whose memory may be at fault", Journal of Documentation, 33, no. 3 (1977): 173-179.
- Brookes, B. C. "'Sources of information on specific subjects' by S. C. Bradford." Journal of Information science 10, no. 4 (April 1, 1985): 173–175.
- Brookes, B. C. "Bradford's Law and the Bibliography of Science." Nature 224, no. 5223 (1969): 953–956.
- Wilkinson, E.A. "The ambiguity of Bradford’s law." Journal of Documentation 28 (1972): 122-130.
- Meadows, Jack. "S.C. Bradford and documentation: a review article." Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 34, no 3 (September 2002): 171-174. [2]