Fid's Standard Reference Code Project and Udc Improvement Programme

Abstract

It is always a pleasure to revisit the London scene, even if the occasion is a symposium where one is asked ‘to put the case for the FID's new policy for a Standard Reference Code’, as if one were Counsel for the Defence in the case of UDC versus SRC. The symposium title seems to reflect disquiet, if not panic, in certain UDC circles as to the FID's intentions, but it is quite misleading if it suggests that the FID, after long years of promoting the UDC, is about to abandon—or even relegate—the system in favour of some new‐fangled and insufficiently motivated substitute. It is true that the SRC project has received most of its impetus so far from the FID Central Classification Committee (CCC), which is virtually equated with UDC, and that the small SRC Group was set up by the CCC on the recommendation of the FID's independent UDC Advisory Panel, but this is because the other relevant FID committee—FID/CR (Classification Research)—is essentially a broad study committee, only very few of whose members could be expected to work on the project, however interested they may be. In the FID Classification Department itself, which is mainly responsible for UDC revision but very much concerned with all indexing languages and their use in libraries and other information transfer or exchange systems, we have long been sensitive to the criticisms directed against the UDC and most other general classifications, which have partly led to the proliferation of special classifications and thesauri, and we have followed closely the trends towards combined use of thesauri with UDC or other classifications, as well as the still vaguely expressed needs of such projects as UNISIST for some simpler sort of standard referral scheme as a ‘macro‐switching’ device. These considerations have convinced us that both an improved UDC and a simpler, more balanced SRC are needed by the information community, and that each can play its own distinctive role: the UDC for detailed subject retrieval in traditional libraries or documentation centres; the SRC as a simpler means for linking or switching between relatively broad subject‐fields in major information exchange systems, such as that envisaged by Unesco and ICSU in their UNISIST project.

Facet Analysis in UDC: Questions of Structure, Functionality and Data Formality

“…The UDC notational system can be further improved through expressiveness, formalization and strict rules for notation use and re-use (Perreault 1969a;Caless 1969;Freeman andAtherton 1968 1969;Lloyd 1972Dahlberg 1971aStrachan 2000;Slavic and Cordeiro 2004;Gnoli 2011).…”

“…This is possibly the weakest point of the UDC system and very much the priority for the editorial team. Al-though the requirements have been put forward many times in the past, the progress here is very slow (Lloyd 1972;Wellisch 1975;Slavic et al 2008). Examples of issues shown in Section 6 and put into historical perspective, here in Section 7, have been dealt with in the UDC MRF database by developing additional data elements and control fields in order to be able to validate the rules and combinations but this has mostly been a damagecontrol exercise.…”

El desarrollo de la Clasificación Decimal Universal: 1992-2008 y más allá

“…Para fi nales de la década de los ochenta ya se habían generado abundantes propuestas orientadas a superar tales difi cultades (Freeman y Atherton, 1969;Lloyd, 1972;Wellisch, 1971;Dahlberg, 1971: 24). Durante las décadas de los sesenta y los setenta muchos expertos en clasifi cación coincidieron con respecto a varios puntos importantes.…”