A brief description of the main memoricides (destruction of libraries and memory) happened during the XX century.

The author of this report has been charged by the UDC Consortium to study the possibility of a revision of class 1 Philosophy. Psychology, of the Universal Decimal Classification. In order to explore the situation and discuss possibilities of revising Class 1, an informal working group was formed at the beginning of 2009 by the author of this report. Members of the working group agreed that the revised class should have a fully faceted structure. One basic step in the revision study is to identify the facets needed to express the contents of philosophical knowledge appropriately. To this purpose, one starting point was provided by examination of the facets of philosophy in existing classifications, in particular BC2. The next steps will be to pay more attention to the details of classes and subclasses, and to the update of terminology and presentation of the schedule. All these components are expected to be included in a final proposal for revision of class 1.

Phase 1 of the new class 61 Medical Sciences was completed early in 2009 and the work on Phase 2 is now well under way. In phase 1, a framework for the new class was established using the organization of facets provided in Class H of the Bliss Bibliographic Classification. Bliss terminology was used in the captions together with UDC notation and formatting as needed. Concepts and terms, the common auxiliaries, and classes related to medicine were used insofar as they were appropriate. There was heavy use of common auxiliary tables of general characteristics (Table 1k) -02 Properties, -04 Relations and Processes and -05 Persons as they became available. As needed, other tools were consulted including Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD). At the end of Phase I the result was a framework for medicine which itself needed revision to be compatible with UDC. In Phase 2 the principal goal is to update the proposed Medical Sciences class to bring it into line with UDC as it exists today and to add new diseases and other terms which are covered in neither Bliss (1981) nor the present UDC 61 (which has not been revised for many years).

The USMARC classification format, developed in the early 1990s for the DDC and LCC systems, is also amenable for other classification systems. This paper presents a proposal for using the MARC classification format for UDC. There are advantages in using this format for the UDC data in an authority file, e.g., for the MRF records and records for combined notations as well. There has been a trend in library catalogues for subject interoperability between traditional classification systems such as the UDC, DDC, LCC and subject headings. An example with great impact is WebDewey, which offers interlinking between classification numbers, the alphabetical index of the tables and LCSH. Another example is the electronic version of LCC Plus, also including links to LCSH. Subject gateways built upon library authority files can support the interoperability between classification systems and subject headings. These gateways can be the backbone of a more universal access through hypertextual navigation structures supported by classification systems including UDC. To our knowledge, the MARC classification format has not yet been applied to the UDC and in this paper we are going to propose a solution supported by some examples.

Social tagging systems, known as ‘folksonomies’, represent an important part of web resource discovery as they enable free and unrestricted browsing through information space. Folksonomies consisting of subject designators (tags) assigned by users, however, have one important drawback: they do not express semantic relationships either hierarchical or associative between tags. As a consequence, the use of tags to browse information resources requires moving from one resource to another, based on coincidence and not on the pre-established meaningful or logical connections that may exist between related resources. We suggest that the semantic structure of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) may be used in complementing and supporting tag-based browsing. In this work, two specific questions were investigated: (1) Are terms used as tags in folksonomies included in the UDC? and (2) Which facets of UDC match the characteristics of documents or information objects that are tagged in folksonomies? A collection of the most popular tags from Amazon, LibraryThing, Delicious and 43Things was investigated. The universal nature of UDC was examined through the universality of topics and facets covering diverse human interests which are at the same time interconnected and form a rich and intricate semantic structure. The results suggest that UDC-supported folksonomies could be implemented in resource discovery, in particular in library portals and catalogues.

Breve repaso de los memoricidios (destrucción de memoria, escritos, bibliotecas) más famosos perpetrados a lo largo del siglo XX.

The importance of languages in the UDC is consistent with the significance of linguistic facets for knowledge organization in general. Languages are the main facet category implicated in processes as crucial as the development of the Linguistics class, the organization of national and regional literatures, the categorization of human ancestries, ethnic groupings and nationalities, and the description of the language in which a document is written. Language numbers are extensively used across the entire UDC scheme, and form the basis for a faceted approach in class structuring and number building. For this reason, Common Auxiliaries of Languages (Table 1c) deserve special attention. Upon the completion of the revision of American indigenous languages (2007-2008), it was evident that other language families would benefit from the same careful examination. The next class we are looking to improve is =4, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Congo-Kordofanian, Khoisan languages. Thus, in 2009 the author has started a research into indigenous languages of Africa. In this paper, the initial research findings for the improvement of the class =4 are presented.

The BBC Archive is one of the world’s largest multimedia archives, held in 27 locations across the UK. The Archive contains over 2 million items of TV and video, 300,000 hours of audio, 6 million still photographs, over 4 million items of sheet music, and over half-a-million documents and records. It is a working media library, fulfilling some 4,000 loans per week, as well as preserving content as part of the UK’s national cultural heritage. A team of cataloguers and media managers classify a selection of current content, as well as enhancing cataloguing and classification of legacy content. There are two major classification schemes used in the Archive, both numerical, and one based on UDC. Lonclass, based on UDC, was developed first, then Telclass, which is used by the Natural History Unit in Bristol. In addition, there are many and various controlled vocabularies that have been developed to tag content in the different nations (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) and the English regions.

Digital Libraries and Digital Repositories are data-intensive with large numbers of fulltext resources accessible online. Activities in the area of Semantic Web development recognize the significant part played by metadata and knowledge organization systems such as classification systems and thesauri in capturing and communicating ‘meaning’. We now have Web ontology standards, such as Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Semantic Web. Standards such as SKOS are also meant to be used as a vehicle for deployment of knowledge organization systems that were not born digital (or XML/RDF) such as thesauri and bibliographic classifications. This paper attempts to present an application of the faceted classification scheme as enunciated by Ranganathan in developing ontologies. It further explores the issues in modelling the faceted scheme of Ranganathan using SKOS.

Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/) catalogues and describes the best Internet resources for education and research. It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and is primarily aimed at evaluating web resources suitable for undergraduate study. The service also offers Internet research skills tutorials, rss feeds of new resources added to the catalogue, a personalisation service (MyIntute), and a blog highlighting trends in Internet research skills and particularly good or topical subject-based resources. The current Intute catalogue of Internet resources is an aggregation of records from eight subject services previously funded by the JISC as the Resource Discovery Network (RDN). This paper describes the process and challenges of integrating these eight databases into one unified catalogue with one standard metadata schema, whilst continuing to satisfy the needs of different subject communities. The paper also outlines a current project to evaluate and compare the cost-effectiveness of manual and automatic metadata creation.