Online UDC courses - in Spanish and Swedish

Of interest to Spanish and Swedish speaking colleagues...

Miguel Benito, the driving force behind and the editor of the Swedish/Spanish/Finish UDC schedules online has now also created an online UDC and Dewey course using Moodle.

This is certainly a very welcome development. I wonder, however, how do potential participants find out about the content and course programme, goals, duration and targeted audience prior to requesting login/pw?

I am also looking forward to hear from Benito whether he finds Moodle a suitable course management system for this kind of training.

New UDC Licence Scheme

In February 2009, a new UDC licence scheme and new prices have been approved by the UDC Consortium.

There are two main categories of licences: publishing and licences for UDC MRF use.

For many existing and prospective UDC users it is important to understand that they do not need licence if they

• apply UDC schedule content for information and knowledge organization from a copy of a publication (printed or CD-ROM) or by accessing an authorised UDC online service
• manually apply the UDC (i.e. there is no use of the UDC MRF) for organizing and indexing of resources for the purpose of document/shelf arrangement, organization of information gateways and library catalogue and in information retrieval where UDC numbers may appear as a part of your document labels or resource description.

In other words, if your collection (printed or digital) is classified by UDC you do not need a licence to show your collection and to browse and search you UDC metadata on the Web. The presence of UDC numbers on documents/books (information objects) or in bibliographic records (and their listing) in libraries, OPACs, bibliographies, web pages do not require licence.

Licences are needed only for publishing of UDC schedules and to use of UDC MRF data in various scenarios. One of the new licences is for using the UDC MRF for educational purposes (e.g. in library schools).

Following a licence application, licences can be:

• purchased according to the license pricing scheme
• negotiated as non-standard licences for cases when this may be of benefit to users and the UDC development
• granted for free (in exceptional cases)

Read more about licence policy, terms and prices here.

UDC SKOSification

danbri wrote (22/03/2009)

"How are things going with SKOSification? If some SKOS extensions (SKOS is designed to be independently extended) are needed to do justice to UDC, it would be great to begin that discussion... particularly as SKOS has just entered "candidate recommendation" stage at W3C - http://www.w3.org/News/2009#item35"

Dan, this is certainly on our current agenda. We thought it would be easier to have a SKOS discussion if we were able to publish a 1000 number outline as a real demonstrator on the web. We could have published the simple text selection of the outline in October - but when I looked into it I realized that classes on this level (i.e. 1000 numbers out of 70,000) do not normally have all details necessary to demonstrate the number synthesis rules. For instance on the top 1000 subdivisions in the UDC we do not have examples of synthesis such as

33:32 Relationships between politics and economy

or more precisely

33-042.3:32 Influence of politics on economy

Phase relationships make sense in detailed indexing and not on the top level disciplines/knowledge areas. But in order to demonstrate this functionality we had to add such examples of combinations in the 1000 number outline.

In addition to this editing we also decided to add multilingual data (and mappings), and to allow editing of translations online. This added a bit of complexity to the interface etc.

We hope that in a couple of weeks we are going to have this up. We would then look into making these data available in various schemas, SKOS being one of them.

Italian UDC Working Group

In January 2009 Claudio Gnoli and Fulvio Mazzochi formed a UDC Italian working group. In the next two years the group will be looking into the UDC
class 1 Philosophy.

The study group will be able to use the contributions of a seminar on the very topic of the classification of philosophy, recently organized at the University of Padua Department of Philosophy by Cristiana Bettella of ISKO Italy. Several Italian librarians discussed the issue of classifying philosophy, both from theoretical viewpoints and for practical application on the shelves of philosophy libraries. The proceedings of this seminar are in preparation.

Well known problems with this class of Philsophy in UDC (similar to the same class in Dewey), include a strong bias towards western philosophy, the sequence of philosophy subdivision being interrupted with 159.9 Psychology and lack of contemporary terminology.

Besides the general revision of concepts and terminology, aimed at making them more aligned with the uses of current philosophical literature, one major objective of the study is to explore the possibilities for restructuring class 1 Philosophy in the direction of facet analysis. This would allow for philosophical concepts to be organized into separate arrays, which could then be used to build compound concepts by synthesis of their notation. Looking into the Philosophy class in UDC will be an opportunity to discuss wider issues and problems in indexing and classification of information resources from this field in general.

Italian classification specialists interested in UDC can join the discussion: Italia — Gruppo di lavoro italiano sulla Universal Decimal Classification. All Italian speaking colleagues interested in the topic are also welcome.

The group also has their own website which is planned to contain the outputs and information on their work: http://italia.udcc.org/.