Meeting 138 of the DDC Editorial Policy Committee (EPC) took place at the Library of Congress on June 8 and 9, 2015, at which EPC members reviewed exhibits from across the schedules. The changes they approved involve, for example, the political ideology of Malcolm X, human trafficking, applied linguistics (e.g., language education), angiosperms (flowering plants), diets that exclude specific foods (e.g., gluten-free cooking, dairy-free foods), lacrosse, and the period of post-apartheid South Africa. Other topics considered by EPC, and which you are likely to hear more about in the future, include information storage and retrieval systems, private military companies, power systems of electric engines, and attack airplanes and close support aircraft. The angiosperms development represents the culmination of a multiyear effort to adopt the taxonomy of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group; it will be posted for worldwide review by the end of the summer. EPC also gave advice on a new long-term effort to represent the sovereign nation status of indigenous peoples. (Anyone wishing or willing to contribute to this effort is asked to contact Rebecca Green, greenre@oclc.org.)
Meeting at the Library of Congress (LC) gave us the opportunity to hear from Beacher Wiggins (Director for Acquisitions & Bibliographic Access at LC), who shared information on LC’s upcoming BIBFRAME pilot (Beacher characterized it as the first step of the first phase of the first pilot) to commence within a matter of weeks; he also talked about the internationalization of the RDA governance structure. An EPC / Dewey Section Forum allowed EPC members to hear about the experience not only of those who are full-time DDC classifiers in the Dewey Section of LC, but also of others at LC who assign Dewey numbers; of particular interest was the report given by Regina Reynolds (ISSN Coordinator at LC) on the assignment of Dewey numbers to ISSN records. Diane Vizine-Goetz (Senior Research Scientist at OCLC) presented an update on FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) headings. Last, but not least, a discussion on end user views of Dewey was led by Carol Bean and brought to our attention some of the ways in which the DDC could be leveraged in the discovery process.
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