UDC Summary: 17 languages online

This weekend we uploaded over 2000 UDC classes in the Ukranian language into the UDC Summary. This is the 17th language so far.

Thanks to help from the publishers and editors of national editions and editors of the UDC Summary, we managed to import almost the complete set of UDC numbers that we needed for many languages.

Our online translator seems to do its job and is being expanded with further features as we speak. Most of the credit, however, goes to our hard working volunteers without whom the whole project would not be possible. We expect that many languages of those that are already online will be completed and proofread by June 2010.

The first alphabetical index and mapping to Dewey summary will appear in March. And we also hope to have the first useful exports available for download. We will be looking for other mappings that may be available and we welcome ideas and suggestions.

December issue of the Classification & Indexing Section Newsletter

The latest issue of the Classification & Indexing Section Newsletter (IFLA) contains a short report from the UDC Seminar 2009 "Classification at a Crossroad: multiple directions to usability".

The issue also contain a short text about the multilingual UDC Summary project.

Multilingual UDC Summary - available

The UDC Summary of around 2,000 classes has been online since October 2009 and can now be browsed in 13 languages here (select language in the drop down menu top).

The UDC summary is fully aligned with the UDC MRF 2009 which is going to be released in the following months. This set is made available for free use under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license (CC-BY-SA).

BSI, AENOR, CEFAL and VINITI (UDC Consortium members) have supplied their UDC abridged edition data in English, French, Spanish and Russian - which served as a basis for translation work. GFDC "Global Forest Decimal Classification" has given their permission to include their top classes under 630 as an extension to the UDC.

We are adding language data and updates as we speak and changes will be visible on a daily basis. In addition to the above 13 languages, we expect Portuguese and Czech shortly.

Captions in all languages appear first and then scope notes, application notes and example of combinations are added as updates progress.

The following functionalities will be added in the near future: search and ABC relative index browsing (at the moment we edit around 16,000 entries) and a chain index in English will be made available in January.

We will start providing various exports for download as soon as we have three complete and proofread languages.

The effort put into this project by colleagues worldwide is admirable. The entire work put into the UDC Summary so far is entirely voluntary including the programming support, the work of our language editors and translators for which we are most grateful.

As soon as we catch our breath we are going to create our 'hall of fame' page to properly acknowledge all contributors whose names are currently listed on our translation tracking page.