As both of our regular readers will know, the German translation of Edition 22 of the DDC -- Dewey-Dezimalklassifikation und Register -- was published in four printed volumes in October last year. This print version has now been joined by an online version, released last month (January 2006) and reported in OCLC Abstracts 9, no. 5 (February 6, 2006). The electronic version is called Melvil,* and (like WebDewey) is accessible to subscribers over the web. It's available in three formats oriented to different uses: MelvilClass is a classification tool, MelvilSearch is a retrieval tool, and MelvilSoap allows licensees to embed access to the DDC in web services based on the Simple Object Access Protocol. Further information on Die Deutsche Bibliothek's DDC-related activities is available at the ddc.deutsch website; details of how to subscribe to Melvil are given here.
* Not to be confused, of course, with the name of the University of California's online union catalog, which is in any case pronounced completely differently.**
** Not really.
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