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.

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.