Page 102 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Unit 5: Universal Decimal Classification (UDC)

Flexibility: UDC is a highly flexible and effective system for organizing bibliographic Notes
records for all kinds of information in any medium. UDC is highly flexible to allow for
constant revision in order to keep pace with development of knowledge. Flexibility of
UDC for responding to complex interrelationship among subjects is more than DDC and
LC.
Precision: Precision is one of the most important merits of use of UDC on Internet. When
any searcher retrieves the information through the classified websites from WWW then
the precision will be high. Classified websites has better precision than search engines
such as Google, Yahoo, Infoseek, etc.

Browsing: UDC is a good knowledge organisation tool, which provides a hierarchical
browsing. Browsing is particularly helpful for inexperienced users or for users not familiar
with a subject and its structure. Hierarchical structures and other features do support of the
browsing. For known item, search capability is optimum. For subject type queries where
specific items are not known, searching is often not effective as browsing. The Internet
services that use UDC to organise digital collections are using a browsable classified
structure and can further optimize access to their resources by exploiting features available
in the current version.

Hospitality: Hospitality is one of the merits of the UDC to go so far since 1904-1907.
Hospitality is also known as other terms by different researchers. Bliss called it expansive
and adaptive quality of notation. Berwick Sayers names it flexibility and defines it
“a notation, which is so constructed that, by the addition of a symbol or symbols, any new
subject may be inserted into any place in the classification without dislocating the sequence
of either the notation or the classification itself” (Sayers, 1962).

Did u know? To keep pace with the knowledge and to survival of the classification scheme,
must provide a ways and means to accommodate the new subjects. The notational systems
have adequate versatility to place new classes, which the idea plane demands.
Speed of updates and degree of support: Since 1992 the speed of updates and degree of
support became a merit of UDC, which was the weakest and serious consideration point
before it. In 1992 the UDC ownership has been transferred from FID to UDC Consortium
a non-profit organization of publisher based in The Hague. The best classification systems
are constantly being reviewed and improved and there is still need to speed up the update
of UDC.
Synthetic Principle: The synthetic principle is one of the main reasons for the widespread
use of UDC in preference to other systems. It extended the use of common tables,
geographical subdivisions and viewpoints, all of which were established to different
degrees in previous classifications, and added the ‘colon principle’ whereby every part of
the classification became divisible by every other part. This, with the growing complexity
of knowledge, was an invaluable invention.

Revision and maintenance: It is one of the greatest merits towards the use of UDC on
Internet. The development and maintenance of UDC was achieved by International
Federation for Information and Documentation (FID) since its origin around 1900. But
during the 1980s, it became clear that a more broadly based, and financially autonomous,
organization was needed to administer and exploit UDC, and FID together with the
publishers of the Dutch, English, French, Japanese and Spanish editions became founder
members of a new body, the UDC Consortium (UDCC). The Consortium assumed
ownership of UDC on 1 January 1992. One of its first actions was to create an international

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