The UDC: Essays for a New Decade

by Alan Gilchrist (Editor), David Strachan (Editor)

An internal FID memo was circulated following the 1989 IFLA congress in Paris, drawing attention to rumours circulating at that meeting to the effect that the "UDC no longer exists and that the operation had folded". It cannot be denied that the UDC does not enjoy the same high profile as its competitors the Dewey Decimal Classification and the Library of Congress Classification which, being used by large numbers of public and university libraries, are used in various MARC format files, but then, the UDC was always, and continues to be, used mainly by special libraries often, but not exclusively, in science and technology and for deeper analysis of a wider range of document types. Even now, the UDC Full Edition is agreed to contain some ten times more entries than DDC and even the popular Medium Edition is still three times larger to which can be added the greater powers of synthesis offered by the UDC. Furthermore, the UDC exists in a truly multilingual environment offering still some possibilities of language-independent information transfer. Perhaps most importantly of all, steps taken to streamline the management and revision of the UDC are beginning to be effective and the modernisation process is likely to accelerate in the near future. In particular, one large and specific revision project is now under way and preliminary results are expected this year. This short collection was easily gathered together from a number of sources. Some of the papers were presented FID's 1988 biennial conference in Finland (only the paper by Scibor and Shcherbina-Samojlova was published in its Proceedings). There is also a brief account of a one-day UDC pre-congress workshop which attracted a great deal of interest in computer applications of the UDC. There is also a paper by David Strachan, the Technical Director of the UDC given to a Nordic Conference in 1989; and two accounts of the way forward, supplementing the paper mentioned above by Scibor and Shcherbina-Samijlova. The first is by Dr La Mcilwaine on the work of the Task Force on Systems Development which has recently concluded a fundamental but practical appraisal of the state of the UDC product. The second is by Professor Nancy Williamson on the UDC in the computer age. It must be apparent to readers of this collection that the UDC is far from defunct; and while it would be unwise to underestimate the problems facing those in charge of its administration it is equally apparent that those problems are recognised, understood and being addressed with energy and imagination.

103 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1990

About the author

Alan Gilchrist DLitt CMC FIMC HonFCLIP undertakes consultancy projects in the private and public sectors and for international organizations, and operates his own consultancy company, Cura Consortium. He was the Founding Editor, and is now Editor Emeritus, of the Journal of Information Science.