2017 European DDC Users Group Meeting

The European DDC Users Group (EDUG) held its 11^th annual meeting 27-28 June 2017 in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). All the presentations described below are available here.

The first day began with a presentation and discussion:

• Sharing classification data: cooperation across boundaries and libraries / Ingebjørg Rype (National Library of Norway) and Unni Knutsen (University of Oslo Library). Roles of National Library of Norway, BIBSYS consortium, Oslo University Library, authoritative sources outside Norway; recommendations for practice to facilitate cooperation, including sharing built numbers in Norwegian WebDewey.

• What more do we want? Discussion led by Rebecca Green (OCLC), Peter Werling (Pansoft) and Elise Conradi (National Library of Norway). Discussion included improvements in WebDewey number building tool, use cases for linked data, searching on components of built numbers, handling of information about history of changes to DDC.

The first day ended with a business meeting, during which discussion of cooperation in classification continued. Elise Conradi (National Library of Norway) was elected as EDUG’s first full representative on the Dewey Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee (EPC) (EDUG has been a corresponding member of EPC since 2016).

The symposium on the second day began with four presentations about Dewey in France:

• Introduction / Emmanuelle Bermès (adjointe du directeur des services et des réseaux, BnF). Welcome to BnF, and a brief overview of Dewey in France and at BnF.

• Use of DDC at the BnF, display of authority data / Jean Maury (BnF). At BnF, multiple uses and displays of Dewey (open stack notice, serials and series, French National Bibliography, authority records for DDC, French digital library Gallica), teaching DDC, work tools for catalogers.

• Dewey classification in public libraries / Michel Renouf (Réseau des médiathèques du Val d'Europe Agglomération). Uses of Dewey in French public libraries, including issues of local simplification and adaptation.

• Lost in classification? Teaching DDC, from indexing to managing collections / Bernadette Patte (Université de Poitiers). Changing context in all kinds of libraries, evolving tools, examples of teaching exercises.

Note: Several people mentioned with sadness the recent passing of Annie Béthery, whose French abridgment/guide to DDC, first published in 1976 and updated regularly, led to widespread use of Dewey in France. For Ms. Béthery’s publications in the BnF catalog, click here. Ms. Béthery’s contribution included library education. Her “Teaching the DDC in French: The Université de Paris X-Nanterre Experience” appears in both French and English in Dewey decimal classification--francophone perspectives: Papers from a workshop presented at the General Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Amsterdam, Netherlands, August 20, 1998.

The second part of the symposium included six presentations on Dewey today and tomorrow:

• Mapping to Dewey / Unni Knutsen (University of Oslo Library). Update on 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, use of new mapping software (ccmapper developed by Pansoft), plans to focus on mapping for end users.

• New features in DDC applications / Tina Mengel (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek [DNB]) and Peter Werling (Pansoft). New features in Dewey translation software and German WebDewey, including “projects” feature for groups of Dewey records that topically belong together and need updates.

• Searching by Dewey number / Juli Beall (OCLC). Emphasis on searches combining subject terms and DDC numbers, using truncation symbol to adjust specificity of DDC number; also, searches on DDC alone to retrieve works in many languages.

• SciGator: a DDC-based browsing library interface / Marcin Trzmielewski, Claudio Gnoli, Marco Lardera, Gaia Heidi Pallestrini and Matea Sipic (Science and Technology Library, University of Pavia). Scientific libraries in Pavia reorganized and converted to DDC, but still have local schemes. SciGator facilitates subject browsing across libraries by mapping between DDC and local schemes and by providing links for topics that appear in multiple disciplines.

• News from Dewey Editors / Rebecca Green (OCLC). EPC Meeting 140 exhibits of greatest interest to EDUG, enhancements to history notes in WebDewey, thoughts about what comes after DDC 23.

• Closing speech / Frédérique Joannic-Seta (BnF). Dewey as a browsing tool and as a precise indexing system; Dewey numbers as a universal language; need for cooperation among Dewey users; EDUG to make OCLC aware of common needs of Dewey users.

Comments

[Michael Panzer]

Congrats to what seemed to have been a fantastic meeting. Glad to still recognize some questions and (new) faces (Claudio, et. al.). To have European representation on EPC is momentous. Magda would have been proud. Congrats, Elise!