S. C. Bradford

S. C. Bradford (1878–1948) was an influential British librarian.

Samuel Clement Bradford was born on January 10, 1878 in London.948) was an influential British librarian. Keeper of the Science Museum Library, 1925–1937.

Contributions

• Bradford greatly increased the size and importance of the Science Museum library.
• Founded the British Society for International bibliography with Alan Pollard as a "daughter society" of the FID and edited its Proceedings.
• 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 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.