Conference outputs - Classification at a Crossroads

The International UDC Seminar 2009 entitled "Classification at a Crossroads: multiple directions to usability" took place in The Hague on 29-30 October 2009.

The conference was very successful in bringing together speakers and audience from different communities interested in, and working with, classification schemes. There were 135 delegates in attendance from 32 countries and from various kinds of information services and institutions, libraries, museums, academia and research institutes. The focus of the conference was on technical and technological issues on how to make classification work in a networked environment.

Talks provoked interesting discussions and left us all with the feeling that we need more events of this kind which would give opportunities to technical, software and standards specialists to interact with classificationists, classification owners and practitioners. The panel discussion at the end of the conference stressed again how the application environment for classification has changed significantly for both those who publish and distribute classification and for those who apply it. The commitment to open sharing and linking of data is a shared responsibility.

It transpires that many issues that deal with classification use are not entirely to do with funding or programming expertise as much as a matter of 'know how' and there is a great responsibility on gatekeepers of this knowledge and expertise to share it and make it accessible.

We have now published talk slides and mp3 recordings. The proceedigns of the conference will be published in the Extensions & Corrections ot the UDC, issue 31 (2009) and the selections of papers will be published in the Knowledge Organization journal.

Press release - UDC Seminar, The Hague

A two day International Seminar on the UDC, organized by UDC Consortium, was held at the UDC Headquarters in the The Hague 4-5 June 2007. The event was entitled "Information Access for the Global community" and its aim was to explore the latest developments and applications of the Universal Decimal Classification. The Seminar brought together UDC publishers, editors of the scheme and UDC users and offered an opportunity for information exchange and discussion of future developments.

There were around seventy participants from over thirty countries including librarians, subject specialists, editors of national editions of the scheme, university lecturers, researchers and LIS students. The conference programme included eleven invited talks on the topics of user experiences and applications, innovative approaches in UDC use and UDC education and training (see programme). Papers will be published in the forthcoming Extensions and Corrections to the UDC, in November 2007 and will be also made available online from the UDC website.

The UDC Consortium chairman Alan Hopkinson and the UDC Editor in Chief Maria Inês Cordeiro invited greater input from users and announced a newly formed international editorial team and new editorial system that will support the collaborative input of an international team of UDC revision experts. The UDC MRF file will be moved to a new database with extended functionality, including improved and more diversified UDC exports in 2007. The UDC Consortium announced that this successful seminar would be the first in the series of similar events it plans to organize in the future.