Does convenience trump accuracy? The avatars of the UDC in Romania

Abstract

This paper concentrates on some major issues regarding the potential of UDC and the current controversy about its use UDC in Romania: i) the importance of hierarchical structures in controlled vocabularies with a direct impact on improved information retrieval given by the browsing function which enables visualizing the hierarchies in subject areas rather than just locating a particular topic; ii) the lack of popularity of the UDC as an indexing and information retrieval language among its users be they librarians or end users of library OPACs; and iii) the situation of UDC teachers and teaching in Romanian universities.