Deweyâ s Decimal Classification was introduced in India in 1915 by Asa Don Dickinson (1876- 1960), a student of Melvil Dewey, on his appointment as Librarian in Punjab University, Lahore. Soon after, India became its largest user of the system in Asia. It is, however, unknown when and how UDC was first used in India. The earliest reference to UDC can be found in Ranganathanâ s classic Prolegomena to library classification (1937), wherein he made a comparative study of the then existing classification systems in order to derive some normative principles of classification, but more so to demonstrate the supremacy of his own system, Colon Classification (CC). Nevertheless, it is known that some libraries were using UDC by the early 1950s.

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.

The Integrative Level Classification (ILC) research project is experimenting with a knowledge organization system based on phenomena rather than disciplines. Each phenomenon has a constant notation, which can be combined with that of any other phenomenon in a freely faceted structure. Citation order can express differential focality of the facets. Very specific subjects can have long classmarks, although their complexity is reduced by various devices. Freely faceted classification is being tested by indexing a corpus of about 3300 papers in the interdisciplinary domain of bioacoustics. The subjects of these papers often include phenomena from a wide variety of integrative levels (mechanical waves, animals, behaviour, vessels, fishing, law, ...) as well as information about the methods of study, as predicted in the León Manifesto. The archive is recorded in a MySQL database, and can be fed and searched through PHP Web interfaces. Indexer's work is made easier by mechanisms that suggest possible classes on the basis of matching title words with terms in the ILC schedules, and synthesize automatically the verbal caption corresponding to the classmark being edited. Users can search the archive by selecting and combining values in each facet. Search refinement should be improved, especially for the cases where no record, or too many records, match the faceted query. However, experience is being gained progressively, showing that freely faceted classification by phenomena, theories, and methods is feasible and working.

In November, 2005, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, proposed the creation of a “World Digital Library” of manuscripts and multimedia materials in order to “bring together online, rare and unique cultural materials.” Google became the first private sector partner for this project with a pledge of 3 million dollars (http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2005/05- 250.html). One month later, the Bibliographic Services Task Force of the University of California Libraries released a report: Rethinking how we provide bibliographic services for the University of California. (Bibliographic Services Task Force, 2005). Key proposals included the necessity of enhancing search and retrieval, redesigning the library catalog or OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog), encouraging the adoption of new cataloguing practices, and supporting continuous improvements to digital access. By mid-January, 2006, the tenor of discussion reached fever pitch. On January 12, 2006, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Library announced the deployment of a revolutionary implementation for their OPAC of Endeca’s ProFind™, which until now had only been used in commercial e-commerce or other business applications. NCSU made the bold claim that “the speed and flexibility of popular online search engines” had now entered the world of the online catalog through the use of faceted navigation and browsing (NCSU, online). A few days later, Indiana University posted A White Paper on the Future of Cataloging at Indiana University which served to identify current trends with direct impact on cataloging operations and defined possible new roles for the online catalog and cataloging staff at Indiana University (Byrd et. al, 2006). The Indiana report was a response to an earlier discussion regarding The Future of Cataloging put forth by Deanna Marcum, Director of Public Service and Collection Management at the Library of Congress (Marcum, 2005). Marcum posed a provocative series of questions and assertions based in part on the Pew Internet and American Life Project study: Counting on the Internet (Horrigan and Rainey, 2005). “[D]o we need to provide detailed cataloging information for digitized materials? Or can we think of Google as the catalog?” Following Marcum’s comments, and the announcement of the “World Digital Library”, the Library of Congress released a commissioned report in March 2006, The changing nature of the catalog and its integration with other discovery tools” (Calhoun, 2006). This report contained blueprints for change to Library of Congress cataloguing processes, advocated integration of the catalog with other discovery tools, included suggestions that the Library of Congress Subject Headings LCSH, long used to support subject access to a variety of cultural objects, be dismantled, and argued that fast access to materials should replace the current standard of full bibliographic records for materials. These arguments were supported by assertions that users seem to prefer the ease of Google over the catalog, and that the proposed changes would place the Library of Congress in a better market position to provide users with the services they want most (Fast and Campbell, 2004; OCLC, 2002). The ensuing debates served to crystallize the intersection and convergence of the traditional missions of the Libraries, Archives and Museum (LAM) communities to provide description, control and access to informational and cultural objects. One consistent theme emerged: What competencies and roles can each community bring to bear upon discussions of digitization, access and discovery, and provide solutions for user needs? The library community had a ready answer. Originally designed to provide inventory, acquisitions and circulation support for library staff, the modern library catalog was designed according to a set of principles and objectives as described by Charles Ammi Cutter in 1876. These principles and objectives underpin the core competency of the library community to create bibliographic records designed to assist users in the following tasks: to find (by author, title and subject), and to identify, select and obtain material that is of interest to them. Discussions about the aims of the catalog are not new and have been ongoing since the early 1970s when the earliest forays of the catalog into the digital age began (Cochrane, 1978). The role played by metadata (i.e. bibliographic records assembled in catalogs), as well as the central importance of search and retrieval mechanisms have long been central players in proposed solutions to providing better services to users. Thus, the suggestions of staff at the Library of Congress, that digitization is tantamount to access, and that search engines, like Google, may supplant the catalog as the chief means of access to cultural and informational materials, have galvanized action throughout the library and information science community. It is critical that any discussions and recommended solutions maintain a holistic view of the principles and objectives of the catalog. The actions and continuing discussions that resulted from these developments drew heavily from several sources, including the experiences of the LAM community with the creation of metadata standards, Web 2.0 applications that make data work harder, more accessible and consolidated, the appeal of folksonomy and social classification, and the importance of leveraging rather than abandoning legacy access systems in a time of spiraling costs and decreasing budgets. For archived discussions of these issues see: lNGC4LIB listserv (Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries http://listserv.nd.edu/archives/ngc4lib.html) and Web4LIB discussion list (http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/). Another valuable source is Lorcan Dempsey’s blog, Of libraries, services and networks (http://orweblog.oclc.org/). To leverage some legacy subject access systems it is proposed that more (not less) should be done to process these data, and corresponding authority files (e.g. thesaurus files) in order to use the faceted navigation and browsing features of new online search engines to best advantage. An ongoing research proposal will be described in brief, concentrating on the second goal of a project which plans to develop an integrated conceptual framework which could serve all designers working on information access and discovery systems. A framework for critical analysis of needed and missing features that is grounded in traditional principles, borne out by practice (Cutter, 1976; La Barre, 2006; Ranganathan, 1962) and which builds on feature analysis protocols for early OPACs is urgently needed (Cochrane, 1978; Hildreth, 1995). Further, another analysis of the sufficiency of current data preparation is long overdue (Anderson and Peréz-Carballo, 2005). This position paper builds on La Barre (2006, unpublished dissertation) which studied faceted browsing and navigation in websites, using wireframe analysis. This research uncovered features needed for digital library OPAC design. Building on JISC and Sparks work, a future study will focus on the information seeking research academics and the information seekers, rather than the general public, or the overstudied undergraduate user, thus rounding out the work of others cited by Marcum, Kuhlthau, etc.

Examples of historical treatments in classification and categorization are abundant in our lives. In American pop culture, we often use decades as a framework to define, understand and interpret fashions, ideas, events, and issues. The 1960s, for example, represent to many Americans a time commonly associated with youth and rebellion and the first vivid images from the decade that come to mind include rock â n roll music and hippies. Another example is the simple categorizations applied by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) on their Website (http://www.nmwa.org/collection/) to organize its permanent collection into: the 16th-17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. In todayâ s widely used library classifications (e.g., Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Classification), historical treatments have always been a standard feature, seen throughout the schedules (e.g., 372.904 for â elementary education in the 20th centuryâ in DDC and PN720 for â literary history in Renaissanceâ in LCC).

When Ukraine was an USSR member, Ukrainian classification experts used the third Russian UDC edition. After Ukraine obtained independence, the need emerged for a national UDC version, in Ukrainian language. Following detailed study and critical analysis of advantages and disadvantages of the major classifications used in Ukraine and worldwide in the 20th century, the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) was chosen because of its international status, wide distribution and accumulated experience concerning its use. The Vidrodzhennya international fund financed the project of a UDC translation and publishing in Ukrainian.

The Slovenian translation of the UDC version of MRF 2001 - in the online edition available at http://www.nuk.uni-lj.si/udk/ - was presented at the UDC Seminar in The Hague, in June 2007. In the autumn of 2008 it was updated according to the UDC MRF 2006, including changes approved from 2002 to 2006.

Chronological arrangement plays an important role in arts organization because it mirrors stylistic development. Over time, increasingly shorter time periods have become appropriate in the chronological organization of the arts due to the rate of technological change, modern communications and education, and modern values that favor pluralism and individuality. Century- or decades-based time periods, although arbitrary, avoid difficulties posed by multiple schools of art being active across overlapping time periods. Such arbitrary time periods appear also to serve well for the current time during which the concept of schools of art has weakened.

This research makes a methodological contribution to the development of faceted vocabularies and suggests a potentially significant tool for the development of more effective image retrieval systems. The research project applied an innovative experimental methodology to collect terms used by subjects in the description of images drawn from three domains. The resulting natural language vocabulary was then analyzed to identify a set of concepts that were shared across subjects. These concepts were subsequently organized as a faceted vocabulary that can be used to describe the shapes and relationships between shapes that constitute the internal spatial composition -- or internal contextuality -- of images. Because the vocabulary minimizes the terminological confusion surrounding the representation of the content and internal composition of digital images in Content-Based Image Retrieval [CBIR] systems, it can be applied to develop more effective image retrieval metrics and to enhance the selection of criteria for similarity judgments for CBIR systems. CBIR is a technology made possible by the binary nature of the computer. Although CBIR is used for the representation and retrieval of digital images, these systems make no attempt either to establish a basis for similarity judgments generated by query-by-pictorial-example searches or to address the connection between image content and its internal spatial composition. The disconnect between physical data (the binary code of the computer) and its conceptual interpretation (the intellectual code of the searcher) is known as the semantic gap. A descriptive vocabulary capable of representing the internal visual structure of images has the potential to bridge this gap by connecting physical data with its conceptual interpretation. This research project addressed three questions: Is there a shared vocabulary of terms used by subjects to represent the internal contextuality (i.e., composition) of images? Can the natural language terms be organized into concepts? And, if there is a vocabulary of concepts, is it shared across subject pairs? A natural language vocabulary was identified on the basis of term occurrence in oral descriptions provided by 21 pairs of subjects participating in a referential communication task. In this experiment, each subject pair generated oral descriptions for 14 of 182 images drawn from the domains of abstract art, satellite imagery and photo-microscopy. Analysis of the natural language vocabulary identified a set of 1,319 unique terms; these terms were collapsed into 545 concepts which were subsequently organized into a faceted vocabulary. Frequency of occurrence and domain distribution were tallied for each term and concept of the vocabulary. A shared-ness rating scale was devised to measure subject agreement on concept use. Rank ordering of concepts by shared-ness measure demonstrated which concepts were more broadly shared across subject pairs. To determine if the concepts generated by subject pairs were used consistently by each pair across the three domains the subjects were considered to be â judgesâ and the Spearman rank correlation was computed to indicate inter-rater reliability. Correlation analysis indicated that subject pairs tended to agree in the extent to which they used certain concepts across multiple domains and 14 concepts with the highest shared-ness sums would form the heart of a shared vocabulary. This faceted vocabulary can contribute to the development of more effective image retrieval metrics and interfaces to minimize the terminological confusion and conceptual overlap that currently exists in most CBIR systems. For both the user and the system, the concepts in the faceted vocabulary can be used to represent shapes and relationships between shapes (i.e., internal contextuality) that constitute the internal spatial composition of an image. Representation of internal contextuality would contribute to more effective image search and retrieval by facilitating the construction of more precise feature queries by the user as well as the selection of criteria for similarity judgments in CBIR applications. In addition, reliance of subjects on the use of analogy to describe images suggests that the faceted vocabulary of terms and concepts could be used to provide both the user and the CBIR system with a link to the visual shape represented by a verbal construct. Developing a visual vocabulary of shapes and relationships could be an important application of the controlled vocabulary that emerged from this study. Verbal access to concepts could serve as entry points leading into the visual vocabulary where shapes would be paired with specific low-level terms.

Forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science / This paper (forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science) and presented at the CAIS Conference examines the context of online indexing from the viewpoint of three different groups: users, authors, and intermediaries. User, author and intermediary keywords were collected from journal articles tagged on citeulike and analysed. Descriptive statistics and thesaural term comparison shows that there are important differences in the context of keywords from the three groups.