Forty-five librarians from seventeen countries attended the Dewey Translators Meeting at the World Library and Information Congress (75th IFLA General Conference and Council) in Milan on August 25. We started the Dewey Translators Meeting in 2003 at IFLA in Berlin as a forum to discuss issues of interest to DDC translation teams (hence the name), but the focus of the meeting has broadened over the years to embrace topics of interest to a wide range of attendees beyond the core group of translation partners.
The first speaker at this year’s meeting, Marie Baliková (Czech National Library), discussed a UDC/DDC crosswalk developed by the Czech National Library for the purpose of collection assessment. The Czech National Library uses the UDC as its primary knowledge organization tool, but makes use of a UDC/DDC crosswalk to enable use of a DDC-based tool for collection assessment. Marie also touched more general issues in knowledge organization—challenges in the creation of crosswalks, identification of weaknesses in classification systems, and problems in the presentation of captions to end users.
Julianne Beall discussed the use of Dewey in the World Digital Library (WDL) project with a focus on the draft guidelines for classifying photographs for the project. We developed the guidelines in consultation with Dewey Section classifiers involved in classifying photographs for WDL. Diane Vizine-Goetz presented an update on two OCLC Office of Research initiatives, Classify, a prototype web service designed to support the assignment of classification numbers, and WorldCat work pages, a project to create rich descriptions from catalog data resulting in a page for every work. Sample WorldCat work pages are available at http://frbr.oclc.org/research/pages/000021759.html. Finally, I presented a brief update on the some changes in the representation of the DDC in MARC 21 formats, design plans for WebDewey 2.0, and the launch of DDC linked data.
We were fortunate to have the heads of all four European DDC Users’ Group (EDUG) working groups in attendance at the Dewey Translators Meeting. Yvonne Jahns (DNB) discussed the work of the EDUG 340 Law Working Group, which has been considering European Union law, theory of sources of law, juristic acts, criminal courts, criminal procedure, and legal professionals. A preliminary report is expected before the end of September, and Yvonne will attend EPC Meeting 132 in November 2009 to discuss the report. Anne-Céline Lambotte (Université de la Méditerranée) reported on the work the EDUG 370 Education Working Group has done on levels of education and subjects in primary education. The 340 and 370 working groups had enough members present in Florence the week before at “Looking at the Past and Preparing for the Future,” an IFLA satellite meeting held August 20-21, to hold a meeting on August 20. Magdalena Svanberg (National Library of Sweden) discussed the EDUG 930 Archaeology Working Group’s concerns about the interdisciplinary provisions for archaeology at 930.1, within 930 History of ancient world to ca. 499. Archaeology of a place after 499 or a place not provided for in T2—3 The ancient world is classed with the history of the place in 940-990 General history of modern world. Gordon Dunsire (University of Strathclyde) reported on the recommendation of the EDUG Technical Issues Working Group that the Dewey editorial team publish the Dewey URI specification. The Dewey URI specification is one of the underpinnings of the recently launched dewey.info service—we plan to issue a discussion paper shortly based on the version of the specification presented at EPC Meeting 131. In the open reporting session, Sohair Wastawy (Bibliotecha Alexandrina) updated the group on the progress of the Arabic translation. We are working together toward the goal of publishing the Arabic translation of DDC 23 near simultaneously with the publication of the English-language edition. By the way, the 2010 EDUG meeting will be held at Bibliotecha Alexandrina in April 2010.
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