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The Belgians Otlet en La Fontaine created the Universal Decimal Classification in order to collect and organize the world's knowledge. This happened in an age when information was almost exclusively made available by libraries. Since the internet, the quantity of information outside libraries is enormous and keeps growing every day. The internet is accessible to anybody, it is fundamentally unorganized and its content changes constantly. Collecting and organizing the world's knowledge seem to have become an impossible ambition. Perhaps it is even unnecessary, since search engines make information retrievable now. And why would we organize information if we can find it? So what will be the role of UDC and libraries in this internet environment? Libraries can still play a role as a major information provider, if they adapt fully to the expectations of a modern end user. The design and the functionalities of online catalogues should allow maximal accessibility, usability and active participation of the end user in the internet environment. Metadata, like UDC, should maximize the visibility of information, enrich it and invite the end user to assign metadata himself.

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

Dewey’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 Ranganathan’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.

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).

There are two main classification systems used in Ukraine, such as Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and Library Bibliographic Classification (LBC). UDC is used mainly in libraries of higher education institutions, scientific, scientific-and-technical, medical, agricultural and other specialized libraries, information centres and publishing houses. The paper introduces recent developments (2009-2010 period) regarding UDC in Ukraine.

In Russia the most widely used library classifications are the national scheme BBK (Library Bibliographic Classification) and the UDC. The Russian National Public Library for Science and Technology is the leading scientific and technical library in Russia. It has a long tradition of classifying literature according to the UDC which started back in 1963. For many years the Library provided support for classification by UDC and also assisted in the areas of research and information while also acting as a supervisor in the matter of indexing for the network of scientific and technical libraries of Russia and the USSR. The paper describes the use of UDC in the environment of the electronic catalogue and the automated library system.

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.

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 paper presents and describes the work on the revision of the zoology of vertebrates, which is published in E&C 32 and introduced in UDC MRF 2010. This is the first stage of a larger project of revision, correction and update affecting all tables related to systematics (zoology, botany, microbiology and virology) to be undertaken from 2011-2013. The first part of the paper briefly introduces the current systems of classification of living and extinct beings, and explains how different perspectives with respect to the arrangement of biological entities have been reflected (or not) in the UDC schedules. The second part gives an overview of problems detected in UDC prior to this revision and explains solutions that were implemented in UDC MRF 2010 indicating tools and methods used in this work.