The paper examines B.C. Vickery’s contributions to the continuing debate on the nature of the information sciences as academic disciplines and domains of professional practice, focusing on ten main topics: what is information science; information science as a field of study; the core of information science; information science and other disciplines; cognate information disciplines; information science: theory and practice; education for informa- tion science; the importance of the user; the place of knowledge organisation; and informa- tion science, looking backward and forward.