Page 108 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Unit 5: Universal Decimal Classification (UDC)

Self Assessment Notes

Fill in the blanks:
21. UDC works extremely well with computers, as it did with earlier automatic
…………………. devices.

22. A core version of UDC, with 60,000 subdivisions, is now available in database format, and
is called the ……………………

Case Study The Library of Congress

Dewey Decimal, and Universal Decimal Classification Systems are Incomplete and
Unsystematic
When the number of libraries using a specific classification system is taken into
consideration alone, Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) is acknowledged as the second
most used classification in the world. As frequently noted in classification textbooks, UDC
is very close in popularity to the more widely used Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC)
and rather more popular than the Library of Congress Classification (LCC). Regardless of
any such categorisation, however, it is notable that UDC is used in the organization and
retrieval of a vast amount of documentation in libraries and information centres
worldwide. UDC was created in 1896 and was based on the Dewey Decimal Classification
system. It was then further developed in terms of structure, vocabulary and syntax to be
used as a more detailed and flexible, synthetic indexing language for information retrieval.
Its first edition was published from 1904-1907.

UDC development, translations to various languages and its use across continents, were
driven by the global membership of its owner - the International Federation of
Documentation (FID), until its decline in the 1980s. UDC was said to be the most important
legacy of the FID which, after two decades of financial and organizational struggle, finally
ceased to exist in December 2000 (Horton, 2003). In 1992, the ownership of the UDC and the
responsibility for its maintenance and distribution was transferred to a consortium of
publishers (the UDC Consortium). This resulted in an improvement of the classification
management which has since focused on the maintenance, revision and update of the
standard 60,000 classes, rather than its full edition of 200,000. The immediate benefit was
that in the period from 1993-2005 a significant proportion of the scheme was revised and
updated (see http://www.udcc.org/major_changes.htm). In addition, since 1993, a standard
UDC scheme can be purchased as a database file (in English): the UDC Master Reference
File, a licence for which is issued by the UDC Consortium.
Updates of the UDC MRF are released annually and since 1993 a new version of the UDC
is made available in January each year. Bibliography of translations confirmed the existence
of various UDC editions, printed and electronic, in no less than 39 languages (Slavic, 2004).
After a decline in use of documentary classifications in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a
noticeable revival of interest in the application of classification in resource discovery on
the Internet and especially in the use of existing schemes in supporting automatic
classification in the 1990s. The value and role of classificatory vocabularies in information
organization and resource discovery has often been emphasized (e.g. Fugmann, 1990;
Soergel, 1999; Hodge, 2000; McGuinness, 2002, also Slavic, 2005: pp. 2). Library classifications,
for instance, have been increasingly used for cross-collection and cross-domain searching:
Contd....

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