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UDC Update 2006
This UDC Update was produced for and distributed at the World Library And Information Congress,
72nd IFLA General Conference and Council, 20-24 August 2006, Seoul, Korea
Consortium membership
Current members of the Consortium are Asociación Española de Normalización y Certificación - AENOR (Spain), British Standards Institution - BSI, Editions du CEFAL/CELES (Belgium) and All-Russian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information - VINITI. The Consortium itself has responsibility for the publication of the Dutch edition. Details of membership categories and rates are available from the UDC Director and on the UDC Website.
Personnel
The UDCC Director, Dr Patria Alkhoven, commenced work for the Consortium in February 2006 on a full-time basis and the office is now operating at full strength. Dr Maria Ines Cordeiro took over as Editor in chief of the classification in June 2006 and Professor Ia McIlwaine has replaced Mr Alan Stevens as Chair of the Consortium.
Editions of the scheme
The Consortium continues to issue the Dutch edition of the scheme in instalments, and also offers a complete edition for sale. The Consortium also published, in 2005, an Extended Place Table as a Supplement to Extensions and Corrections to the UDC , no. 28 (2005). This Supplement conveys an updated version of Table 1e - Common Auxiliaries of Place, that is at the old 'full edition' level of detail. Although this level is not officially maintained, it was considered useful to provide an authoritative version of this extended material as it is known that many publishers and users need such level of detail.
Latest editions of the scheme include the British Standards Institution complete edition, issued in 2005. This edition comes in two volumes, the second one being the Alphabetical Index will be available later this year. BSI also published, in 2003, an Abridged edition of the classification, and continues to maintain its Web version of the classification, UDC-online .
Other recent editions from Consortium members or licensees are available in Spanish (last rev. ed. in print, 2004), French (Ed. du CEFAL, in print, 2004) and in Czech (last rev. ed., on CDROM, 2004). For more information, see http://www.udcc.org/pub.htm .
Training courses and Guide to the UDC
The series of successful training courses on UDC has continued, normally at the British Standards Institution headquarters, but courses are also held to suit the specific needs of users, by request. As a further aid to application of the scheme, the UDC Consortium published The Universal Decimal Classification: a guide to its use , by I.C. McIlwaine at the end of 2000. Croatian and Spanish editions are available and an updated one in Romanian is in preparation. Other translated editions of the Guide are encouraged. Anyone interested in publishing it in another language should contact the UDCC Director for the conditions that apply. Copies of the English edition of the Guide can be ordered from the UDCC in The Hague at 50 euro, including postage, (plus 7.50 euro if paid by cheque) or from BSI in London at £35.00 per copy
UDCC Website & discussion list
The Consortium Website receives over 1000 hits per day and includes a list of users who consent to their names being published so that they can be contacted by colleagues to exchange experience and information about practical UDC issues. Updates regarding this list should be sent to UDC@KB.nl . Attention is also drawn to the e-mail discussion list, which anyone can join at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/lists/udc-forum.html .
Extensions and Corrections to the UDC, 28 (2006)
Extensions and Corrections (28, 2006) will be published as usual in November, and will contain reports from Consortium members and from current revision work. It will cover reports on progress with the revision of class 61 Medicine and on the joint project with the Dewey Decimal Classification on mapping Class 2 - Religion to the DDC, and a proposal for the revision of Mathematics and Physics which has been prepared by VINITI. As for revised tables, publication of remaining parts of Area Table will continue in this issue, as well as an expansion of Class 2 to provide detail for Islam.
A Supplement to next issue of Extensions and Corrections will publish An Extended Table of Common Auxiliaries (Except Place) . This comes in the same line, and is offered on the same principle as the extended place table that appeared as a supplement to Extensions and Corrections last year. It will provide an authoritative source of all that is currently valid in Tables 1a to 1d and 1f to 1k, and including details from older editions, at the 'full' level, that have never been cancelled.
Copies of Extensions and corrections will be available from November 2006 and may be ordered from the UDC Consortium. It will be published on CD-ROM and in hard copy for 125 euro + postage and packing and VAT is applicable.
Future revision work
Plans for future revision work are being prepared for the medium term, and will be settled until the end of the year as part of the reorganization of UDCC activities and teams. Besides the continuation of the work already in progress, it can be anticipated that Photography and Music are probably next areas to be revised, as well as a revision of class 9 to remove the strong British bias in History and extend the examples of combination to other countries in order to balance its content and make it more easy to apply.
The establishment of priorities for future revision work will be accompanied with actions to call for users' opinions and needs, and for a more diversified participation in revisions. One fundamental aspect of the reorganization of activities regarding maintenance of the UDC is to induce the constitution and to support the work of specialist teams for different areas of knowledge. Calls for participation will de issued eventually, and any subject specialist, user or expert in classification willing to contribute should contact the Editor in Chief.
New editorial support system for UDC
Plans are at an advanced stage for the development of a new editorial support system for UDC. The objectives of the new system are threefold: i) to improve MRF management by using mainstream technologies that overcome some of the limitations of the current system, based on CDS/ISIS; this will be possible by making use of a relational database plus Web technologies; ii) to provide an online collaborative platform to enhance productivity of the UDC editorial revision processes, which will allow more flexibility and larger participation in revisions by having a central online point of management with controlled accesses; and iii) to diversify the MRF outputs, by designing alternative exports of UDC data, notably in MARC and XML.
A call for tenders was already issued and a decision will be taken by October. It is expected the new system to be operational until Summer 2007. This work will be accompanied by improvements to the MRF data format in conjunction with work on the UNIMARC Classification Format and related XML versions. Among other aspects of these data redefinitions are features to support the management of multilingual MRF records.
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