The presentations from the Dewey Breakfast/Update on January 16, 2010, at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston are now available on the Dewey web site at http://www.oclc.org/dewey/news/conferences/default.htm.
Libbie Crawford gave a general DDC product update, and discussed the new screen layouts and features in WebDewey 2.0. Juli Beall presented work to date on improvements to 281.5-281.9 Eastern churches and 340 Law. Proposed changes to the development for 281 Eastern churches are currently out for an initial round of review with a group of experts in Orthodox Christianity. (Note: Rebecca Green is the lead editor on this work, but did not attend ALA.) Juli is working closely with the European DDC Users’ Group (EDUG) 340 Law Working Group on improvements to 340 Law to address European Union law, criminal courts and procedures, and general issues related to legal systems based on civil law.
I discussed our work on 370 Education. For several years, we have been studying improvements to 370 Education to make the schedule a more useful general framework for the organization of education in a global context. We have focused initially on two areas in the 370 Education schedule: primary education in specific subjects (372.3-372.8) and levels of education (372-374, 378). To date, we have received advice from the EDUG 370 Education Working Group, members of the American Association of School Librarians, and the Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee (EPC). There is a discussion paper available on the Dewey web site that describes our current proposals. The revisions proposed in the paper are still preliminary, and subject to further development and review. We are seeking comments on the proposed revisions and open questions in the paper by February 27, 2010—interested parties can comment directly here on the blog, or e-mail their comments to me at mitchelj@oclc.org.
I also gave a quick update on the project under way with the OCLC Research to create a BISAC authority file and add Dewey numbers to the records. Michael Panzer wrapped up the meeting with a demonstration of some applications of the current set of Dewey linked data available at dewey.info. He also discussed our plans to link Table 2 (Geographic Areas, Historical Periods, Persons) records with FAST geographic headings—besides the usefulness of additional terminology, the Table 2-FAST links will be a path to associate geographic coordinates with Table 2 records (records for FAST geographic headings include geographic coordinates algorithmically assigned from GeoNames). Exciting stuff!
The next Dewey Breakfast/Update will be held in conjunction with the Public Libraries Association 13th National Conference in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday, March 25, 7:00-8:00 a.m. (place to be announced). Mark the date—we expect lots of new developments over the next two months!
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