Page 110 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Unit 5: Universal Decimal Classification (UDC)

Notes
used the UDC and in what way, and to invite their ideas on deficiencies and priorities. The
survey was based on a printed A4 questionnaire (parallel texts in English, German and
French). Preparation began in 1988 and the collation of the returned data was completed
before the end of 1989. Distribution was both direct (using mailing lists e.g. of subscribers
to the Extensions & Corrections to the UDC) and indirect (with the help of FID national
members, national UDC committees, and publishers of the various editions). For example,
advantage was taken of the distribution of the English Medium Edition in 1989 as BSI
agreed to enclose a questionnaire with each completed order. Results showed that there
were 339 completed forms returned from institution using UDC in 50 countries. According
to D. Strachan (2004), the FID UDC Management Board decided that the returns were not
sufficient to merit further action beyond making the survey results available to its Task
Force for UDC System Development, which was doing its work at that time and no report
was published.
In 1989-1990, The Task Force for UDC System Development, on the other hand, did their
own investigation of 27 institutions using UDC. The institutions mentioned in their report
were: eight libraries in the U.K., a Japanese library, an Eastern European National
Bibliographic Agency, a Nigerian University, an African Documentation Centre, nine
libraries from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Switzerland (the name of the institutions
were not provided), and six Austrian libraries (the full name of the institutions were
given). Investigations were based on a questionnaire (13 questions) that focused on the
way in which each institution used UDC and their expectations from the scheme. Reports
indicated that some of the interviewees were considering a change to another classification
scheme in the future (Finland) and some to abandon using classification all together if this
would pose a problem for automation, as was the case in Austria (see Task Force for UDC
system development, 1990). In 1991, the International Association of Technological
University Libraries (IATUL) did a survey on classifications in use within their member
libraries and of the 87 (46%) questionnaires returned, UDC was used in 37 libraries in
18 countries and appeared to be the most popular classification system. This report also
revealed that a number of libraries were planning changes, expecting that with the
development of OPACS, searching would be carried out by keywords with a classification
system in the background (IATUL, 1990). In the summer of 1994, BSI conducted a survey
with the assistance of the British Council. The goal was, obviously, to establish the total
number of potential customers for UDC products in English. A questionnaire was circulated
with every unit of its UDC product sold (135 sent - 51 returned) and 65 letters were sent to
British Council offices. The total number of countries covered was 61. Replies from the
British Council (32 in total) confirmed the use of UDC in 15 countries (BSI DISC Brief
report on UDC survey, 1995). In 2003, the developers of IUFRO Global Forest Decimal
Classification - formerly the Oxford Decimal Classification for Forestry, which was
developed and is usually used in conjunction with UDC - conducted a survey of forest
libraries in 27 countries. Their data showed institutions using UDC in the special forest
libraries of 19 countries (Holder & Saarikko, 2003).
The use of classification in general, or UDC for that matter, ought to be observed within a
wider context and over a longer period of time as there are various factors to be taken into
account. One such well-known factor is the application of free text searching in information
systems within libraries and information services which abated the interest in classification
in general and affected the number of users throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In parallel
with this, the pressure to reduce staff and cataloguing costs made many libraries change
from UDC to Dewey which came (readily assigned) as a part of the OCLC bibliographical
package. The migration from UDC to DDC started to be more evident in 1990s and was
especially so in western European and English speaking countries for which the OCLC
Contd....

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 105