Page 107 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Knowledge Organization: Classification and Cataloguing Theory

Notes Until 1992 UDC was managed by the International Federation of Documentation (FID) in the
Hague (Netherlands). When it became apparent in the 1980s that a more broadly based
organization was needed to administer UDC, FID and the publishers of the Dutch, English,
French, Japanese, and Spanish editions combined to found a new body, the UDC Consortium
(UDCC). An early action of the UDCC was to create an international database that would be a
master file. The database, called the Master Reference File (MRF), now containing more than
66,000 entries, is held at the Royal Library in the Hague and is updated once a year. An Editor-
in-Chief and an Editorial Board of international membership oversee the continuous revision
and expansion. Since 1992, UDCC has maintained the scheme by reviewing its content and
initiating revisions and extensions. The results are published in Extensions and Corrections to
the UDC. A two-volume, easy-to-use edition of UDC was published in a “complete” edition by
the British Standards Institution in 2005. It is derived from the MRF. Supplements are issued each
year, each one cumulating all previous ones so that one has only to look in two places for the
latest notations. An abridged edition, containing about 4,100 entries, was published in 2003.
“UDC Online” is an electronic version of the complete edition of UDC and is available by
subscription. Its features are similar to features of WebDewey. In the United States UDC is used
mainly in some scientific and technical libraries and by one abstracting database. More detailed
descriptions of the UDC, its development, and its application may be found in a number of
publications.

Task Compare and contrast UDC with Special Classifications.
Self Assessment

State whether the following statements are true or false:
19. UDC was not based on the DDC.
20. Until 1992 UDC was managed by the International Federation of Documentation (FID) in
the Hague.

5.10 Application to UDC

UDC works extremely well with computers, as it did with earlier automatic sorting devices.
Scrolling through an on-screen display in classified order makes for productive browsing; and
UDC’s distinctive symbols make it possible to perform searches for any part of a compound
number or for specified combinations of symbols, so providing highly accurate subject retrieval.
UDC’s combination of numerical codes and natural-language descriptions makes it amenable to
numerical and alphabetic sorting, in maintaining tools such as catalogues, authority files and
indexes. Both keepers and users of information sources are well served by UDC.
A core version of UDC, with 60,000 subdivisions, is now available in database format, and is
called the Master Reference File (MRF). The descriptions are currently in English, with other
languages expected to follow. To start with, there was only one version of UDC, which would
now be called a ‘full edition’, but there are now editions of various lengths. An idea of the
growth of UDC is given by the number of entries in successive full editions. The first edition
(1905–1907) had about 33,000, the second edition (1927–33) over 70,000, and the third (1934–48)
probably double that, 140,000. Nowadays there are more than 220,000 direct subdivisions.

!
Caution To meet the demand for more manageable versions of UDC, briefer editions have
also been developed.

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