The African Studies Centre (ASC) Leiden is an independent foundation associated with Leiden University. Its aims are to undertake research on Africa in the social sciences, to maintain a specialist library and documentation department, and to facilitate the dissemination of information on Africa. The library houses a broad-based collection in the field of the social sciences and the humanities, the only collection in the Netherlands focusing entirely on Africa. Current holdings include some 75,000 books, 2,000 periodicals, of which almost 600 are current subscriptions, about 1,000 documentaries and feature films, and a growing digital collection. Approximately half the holdings are English, about a third French, and the remainder is divided between German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Portuguese and Spanish. Between 2000 and 2006, the library carried out a project to improve subject access to the ASC collection by building an African Studies Thesaurus and converting all subject codes used until then into thesaurus descriptors.

UDC Editorial Workshop is a meeting of the UDC Editors and UDC Advisory Board and invited guests. The 2011 workshop took place on 21 September 2011, in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague and was attended by twenty participants. The focus of the workshop was on the structural issues of the UDC scheme, in particular with respect to the ongoing faceting of the scheme and the way in which this influences the UDC content revision process.

This paper explores the use of UDC in libraries and information centers of Delhi. The information presented here is part of the larger data set collected by the author while compiling the Delhi libraries web directory. The survey, conducted through library visits and questionnaires, shows that in Delhi there are sixty four libraries using various editions of UDC. These include libraries of Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), as well as libraries of the Judiciary system situated in Delhi such as Supreme Courts of India, High Courts of Delhi and Districts courts of Delhi. Some libraries of national importance such as Indian Institute of Technology, National Agricultural Library, National Medical Library, National Science Library, are also using the UDC.

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.

UDC Summary (udcS) is a selection of around 2,000 UDC numbers intended for free use, training and research of the UDC, and is published as an online database at http://www.udcc.org/ udcsummary/php/index.php. This is the first time in the UDC’s history that the scheme has been made available to any extent for free use in so many languages as a single service. By the end of 2009, this abridged scheme was available in 13 languages and at the time of writing this report there are already over 20 languages online. The UDC Summary is available in languages in which the UDC has never been translated before such as Armenian, Greek, and Hindi.

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.

The paper describes a problem particular to universal knowledge classifications with a disciplinary structure. These types of classification present concepts subsumed to the disciplines in which they are studied and thus have to resolve the problem of concepts being repeated in different fields of knowledge. The author looks into how the impact the repetition of concepts in the UDC disciplinary structure may have on information retrieval. He considers advantages and disadvantages of different approaches in presenting re-used concepts in the scheme.

The author explains some general principles in structuring classifications, in particular the facet as a basic building element of the scheme. The paper provides an overview of structural and presentational elements of facets and how these can be expressed through notational system. The author also analyses the way some broad fundamental facets of concepts are presented in UDC tables, when these are represented by special auxiliaries, and proposes a way of normalising facet presentation so that it becomes consistent and easy to recognize in UDC.

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).