European DDC Users Group (EDUG) Meeting

The European DDC Users Group met in Göttingen, Germany at the Verbundzentrale des GBV, 25–26 April 2016.  The first day’s symposium "Discovering Dewey in Göttingen" included presentations on a variety of topics concerning the DDC.  (All the presentations described below are available here.)

• Project Coli-conc (project with aim of developing infrastructure to aid semi-automatic creation and management of mappings between library knowledge organization systems and to enable easy access to the same)

• Dewey Number Building (use of WebDewey number building tool: strategies and problems)

• Data-driven Development (use of WorldCat data to focus on areas of the schedules needing development)

• Machine-based issuing of DNB [Deutsche Nationalbibliothek] Subject Categories and DDC Short Numbers for Medicine in the German National Library

• End users & Dewey - can WebDeweySearch and linked data make Dewey work harder? (German, Swedish, and Norwegian WebDeweySearch)

• Mapping to WebDewey (project of Oslo University Library to map source vocabularies Humord [thesaurus covering mainly humanities and social sciences] and Realfagstermer [subject vocabulary for science, informatics, mathematics] to Norwegian WebDewey)

• Dewey in the Basel Register of Thesauri, Ontologies and Classification (role of DDC in BARTOC.org, a multilingual, interdisciplinary directory of knowledge organization systems and terminology registries)

• DDC Updates & Notification functionality in WebDewey (report on new feature being tested at German National Library)

• Automatic Analysis of DDC Numbers based on MARC21 (analysis to check whether numbers are valid DDC numbers and if so what they mean. Look at slide 35 of this presentation for analysis of winning number in Dewey Palindrome contest)

The second day—which ended with a business meeting—began with two presentations on "Mappings - what has happened since last year's workshop" based on the experiences of the Oslo team:

• EDUG's recommendations for mapping (suggestions for changes to EDUG's recommendations for best practice in mapping involving Dewey Decimal Classification [DDC] [version 20151009])

• Maintenance of mappings (challenges of keeping up with changes to source vocabulary and target vocabulary)

The 20151009 version of EDUG's recommendations for best practice in mapping involving Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) is available here.  Forums for discussion of mapping recommendations and other Dewey issues are found here.