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.

This paper discusses the development of the Polar UDC. It examines some elements of the UDC specific to the Polar context, in particular the geographical auxiliary schedule. Some future plans for the implementation of UDC in a library and also in a museum context are outlined.

The article provides a short overview of the history of the UDC use in Lithuania and current project of UDC translation in Lithuanian.

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.

The author discusses the value and importance of using short extracts from classification tables to support subject access management. While detailed classification is time consuming, complex and costly, the classification of documents into broader classes is a simpler and easier way of achieving meaningful and useful subject organization. The paper outlines the role of this type of classification use in bibliographic listings, in the organization and representation of physical documents, in the presentation of web resources, in statistical reports in collection development and use, and, last but not least, in information integration in a networked environment. This approach of subject classification is illustrated by the Slovenian union catalogue COBISS/OPAC in which a standardized set of UDC codes is used. The author emphasizes the importance of this outline for the homogeneity and continuity of the use of UDC in Slovenia and explains how this may be weakened by the changes in the top level of UDC.

The paper addresses issues in establishing a user-friendly systematic collection arrangement following a merger of two high school and college library collections classified according to UDC. In the way it was used, this scheme presented some weaknesses with respect to collection usage. Due to the disciplinary nature of UDC, subjects and phenomena are dispersed in the scheme according to the disciplines in which they are the subject of study. At the same time students in a school library often seek interdisciplinary subjects and need access to clusters of documents which according to UDC may be classed in several different knowledge areas. The author illustrates how this problem was resolved by re-arranging the collection according to phenomena. This was achieved by interpreting UDC numbers as if they represented specific phenomena. Thus, by superimposing some local indexing rules onto a disciplinary knowledge organization system it was possible to collocate interdisciplinary subjects under a single class number. Furthermore, by reversing subject numbers and form auxiliaries (atlases, dictionaries, textbooks etc.) which is an option envisaged in the design of UDC, documents were collocated in the way they are most frequently used by students. The author suggests that, in practice, one often needs to overcome the constraints of disciplinary classification and he discusses the approach used in his school library collection.

Report on the 2011 International UDC Seminar, "Classification and Ontology: Formal Approaches and Access to Knowledge", which took place on 19-20 September 2011 in the National Library of the Netherlands (The Hague).

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 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.

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.