Douglas John Foskett OBE (27 June 1918 – 7 May 2004) was a British librarian and library and information scientist, and author of several special faceted classification systems. Foskett was born in London on 27 June 1918. He received his BA from Queen Mary College in 1939 and in 1954 his MA at Birkbeck, University of London. He started his career in the late 1930s as a librarian in the Ilford Public Libraries in Essex. During World War II he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and later in the Intelligence Corps. From 1948 to 1957 he was Head of Information in the Research Division of the Metal Box Company Limited. In 1957 to 1978 he was at the Library of the Institute of Education in London, where he devised and implemented the specialist London Education Classification scheme to orga