Thursday 19 March 2009

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/.

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