I spent the last week of January and the first week of February in Norway and Sweden. The purpose of my trip was threefold:
I spent over a week in Oslo, most of it working on the mixed translation project at the National Library of Norway. Ingebjørg Rype, Karen Nisja Domaas, and I worked on developing a mixed Norwegian-English version of 006 and 616-616.1 (back in DC, my colleague Rebecca Green performed magic on the mixed translation files each evening to transform the English-language instructions into their Norwegian counterparts for Dewey records in Norwegian). Magdalena Svanberg (National Library of Sweden) joined us in Oslo at the midpoint of my visit to continue work on the mixed translation, and to discuss future project directions. Inger Johanne Christiansen gave me a wonderful behind-the-scenes tour of the National Library of Norway (a highpoint of which was the chance to look at some Ibsen manuscripts that happened to be out for an Ibsen scholar’s visit later in the day). On February 3, Magdalena, Ingebjørg, and I gave presentations at Kunnskapsorganisasjonsdagene 2009. Later that day, we met with NKKI members to discuss the needs of Norwegian librarians in the design of the next Norwegian translation. We also discussed the treatment of Nordkalotten (the area north of the Arctic Circle in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia). On the following day, Magdalena and Ingebjørg participated in a Dewey workshop sponsored by the National Library of Norway, NKKI, and JBI (the three of us used a break in the workshop to squeeze in a final meeting on the mixed translation research project). After the workshop in Oslo ended, Magdalena and I flew to Stockholm for a whirlwind two days of meetings. The first was occupied by a full-day seminar on Dewey (the aforementioned “Dewey—let’s do it!”). On the day following the seminar, I met with catalogers and subject experts at the National Library of Sweden to discuss use of the DDC in general, mappings between Svenska ämnesord (SAO) and Dewey, and the addition of Dewey numbers to SAO records. We also managed to have two side discussions about classification of visual materials and proposed changes to the 780 Music schedule. (After my return home, I shared draft documents on both topics with our Swedish colleagues, and we have already received back preliminary reactions to the proposed changes in 780 Music [we will be posting a discussion paper on 780 Music for public comment shortly].) I also briefed members of the Libris department on our work on MARC, RDF/SKOS, and URI representations of DDC data, plus a prototype DDC history-of-concepts web service. During the course of my trip, the National Library of Norway made a decision to proceed with a web version of a Norwegian translation of the DDC, and the administration of the National Library of Sweden awarded preliminary funding to a group headed by Magdalena Svanberg to launch work on the Swedish translation of the DDC in September 2009. Also, three more Swedish university libraries (Göteborg, Linköping, and Gävle) announced that they would make the switch to the DDC. My colleague Lorcan Dempsey often writes about the need to make our data work harder. The underlying DDC data files (including the set of interoperable translations), the mappings between Dewey and other terminology resources, and the large body of content categorized by Dewey available in WorldCat and elsewhere are incredible resources in the networked information environment. We are focused right now on a number of efforts to make the DDC data available in web-friendly formats for human and machine interaction. The challenge remains to find ways to make our DDC data work harder.
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