Page 109 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Knowledge Organization: Classification and Cataloguing Theory

Notes
not only to support simple resource browsing but also to underpin vocabulary mapping
and multilingual resource discovery (cf. Slavic, 2006a). In the period 1992-2006, the UDC
was applied in resource organization, for a longer or shorter period of time, in nine
quality subject gateways with an English interface and numerous smaller directories (3).
After 2002, subject gateways using UDC have been more predominant in Central and
Eastern European portals (Stoklasovà, 2003). The general trend in resource discovery on
the Internet is to use classification, in this case UDC, behind a system, as a mapping
mechanism between different indexing systems or languages or as a source of structured
terminology for automatic text processing and categorization. A similar trend could be
said to be present in union library catalogues in library networks with a tradition of and
good practice in UDC use. Here UDC can be more often seen as part of subject authority
data supporting information retrieval via mapping to other classifications or subject heading
systems in more than one language (Balikovà, 2003; Slavic, 2006).
In response to the described changes and needs in information organization and discovery,
the UDC Consortium is considering the improvement and wider dissemination of machine
readable UDC data. Among other things (such as a better structural and semantic linking
of the scheme) this would include a mapping to other special and general classification
systems, multilingual features and exports of UDC data in different standard vocabulary
formats.
Classification user surveys are usually commissioned or conducted by a scheme owner or
publisher. In the case of UDC, and up to 1992, this was the FID. After 1992, monitoring of
the number of users seems to have been left to the individual UDC Consortium members
i.e. publishers holding the rights to publish in a given language; e.g., BSI for English,
Asociación Española de Normalización y Certificación (AENOR) for Spanish, Vserossijskij
Institut Nauènoj i Tehnièeskoj Informacii (VINITI) for Russian etc. The UDC Consortium
as their representative body did not publish or disseminate any centrally collated data on
UDC users worldwide. Whatever the reason may be, the fact is that there is no official,
publicly available, estimate of the total number of countries or institutions using UDC in
the period 1992-2006, or for that matter, since the 1980s. Other known sources of survey
data are national or international cataloguing agencies or library networks recording the
use of indexing systems (4). Unfortunately, information on these surveys is hard to access
and merge for such a widely used system as UDC, and it would be almost impossible to
produce any complete or exhaustive account of these data in a shorter period of time. The
background of this research concentrated, therefore, on the last available published survey
data (in English) and several unpublished surveys from the period 1989-2003. Also, there
were a few articles discovered estimating the number of UDC users based on obsolete
data which mainly illustrated and justified the need for new research.
The last published survey on UDC use was on UDC users in the U.K. in 1979–1980 by
Hindson (1981) who established that there were, at the time, 640 libraries using UDC in
the U.K. and Northern Ireland (out of 2,895). Later articles and papers operate with numbers
published in the 1980s and earlier. Thus Sukiasyan (1988: 69) reports that the broad library
network in the former USSR consisted of 300,000 libraries and the UDC was used as an
obligatory system only in scientific-technical libraries. Gilchrist (1992) refers to the FID
survey from 1968 which reported that there were a total of 100,000 users, mostly in the
USSR, European countries, Latin America and Japan. Based on articles from the 1980s,
which largely recycled even older information, Nilbe (1997) reached a count of 60 countries
and 100,000 institutions using UDC worldwide. Information on the very last (unpublished)
FID survey was discovered in the report of the Task Force for UDC System Development
from February 1990 which briefly mentioned a UDC user survey conducted in
1988–1989(5). Apparently, the purpose of this survey was both to get information on who
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