Page 91 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Knowledge Organization: Classification and Cataloguing Theory

Notes Explain the Comparisons with Special Classifications
Describe the Application to UDC

Introduction

UDC is the second classification of the three schemes of library classification. UDC was original
adopted for establishing and maintaining the Universal Bibliographic Repertory, an international
bibliography. UDC is an international, and not a national, effort to meet universal needs. The
use of decimal notation as a code for expressing the concepts in a documentary classification was
first proposed by the physicist André Marie Ampère (1775-1836) and popularized by the American
librarian Melvil Dewey in the later 19th century. Now a good number of special libraries are
using UDC. In India UDC is more prominent for special libraries.

5.1 Brief History of UDC

The Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) is a thriving, modern indexing and retrieval
language, used for organizing material in technical information services and on websites; but it
has a history going back a century and more, and its originators, Paul Otlet and Henri La
Fontaine, were clearly far-sighted people.
Dewey developed and used his scheme in the library of Amherst College, Massachusetts, and it
was published in 1876. This first edition, entitled ‘Classification and subject index’, was brief,
with its 10 pages of tables containing 919 headings, and lacked some of the features later associated
with the scheme (it was not called decimal, and contained no decimal fractions); nor was the
order of subjects particularly innovatory, deriving from a tradition going back to the Paris
booksellers of the 18th century; but it still contained the beginnings of a system that was to
prove immensely serviceable and influential. The scheme was expanded in successive editions,
and its use spread rapidly throughout the USA and then in other English-speaking countries.
It played an important part in establishing the norm of a systematic code denoting the subject as
a primary means of arranging and retrieving literature in libraries – grouping together works
on similar subjects, irrespective of marks identifying individual documents.
In 1895, a further step in the development of decimal classification was taken by Paul Otlet (1869-
1944), a young Belgian barrister already noted for his work in bibliography in the social sciences,
working with Henry La Fontaine (1854-1943). Under the aegis of the newly founded Institute
International de Bibliographie (IIB) in Brussels, Otlet and La Fontaine were working on the
projected Universal Bibliographic Repertory, which was intended to become a comprehensive
classified index to all published information. A means of arranging the entries would be needed,
and Otlet, having heard of Dewey’s Decimal Classification, now in its fifth edition (1894), had
obtained a copy and been deeply impressed by it. He wrote to Melvil Dewey in 1895 and
obtained permission to translate it into French. Otlet and La Fontaine saw in Decimal Classification
a taxonomy of human knowledge that could be expressed ‘in an international language - that of
numbers’; they saw too that, because of the extensibility of decimal numbers, it could readily
accommodate the detail needed for bibliographic rather than strictly library use.

Notes The idea outgrew the plan of mere translation, and a number of radical innovations
were made, adapting the purely enumerative classification (in which all the subjects
envisaged are already listed and coded) into one, which allows for synthesis (the
construction of compound numbers to denote interrelated subjects that could never be
exhaustively foreseen).

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