The European DDC Users Group (EDUG) held its 12th annual meeting April 26-27, 2018, at the Swiss National Library, Bern, Switzerland—the same venue as its first meeting in 2007 (presentations from that meeting are available here).
The presentations described below are available here.
The symposium on the first day began with welcomes from Madame Doffey (Swiss National Library) and Harriet Aagaard (National Library of Sweden and EDUG chair).
- Mapping for end users / Unni Knutsen and Karoline Hoff, University of Oslo Library. Progress report on a project to improve topical search results for students; the project involves search log analysis, mapping DDC to controlled subject headings to facilitate searching across multiple vocabularies in English and Norwegian with DDC as the hub, relevance ranking based on relationship types.
- Automatic classification at the DNB / Frank Busse, DNB. Progress report on automatic classification based on machine learning to assign DDC Subject Categories (for the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie) and DDC Short Numbers (adapted from Abridged Edition 15).
Following this presentation there was general discussion of the problems of automatic classification, including how to reduce and otherwise cope with high error rates.
- DDC at the Swiss National Library / Vera Uhlmann, Swiss National Library. Overview of the history and use of the DDC at the Swiss National Library: a classified catalog based on DDC 5th edition (1894), a shift in 1920s to UDC, DDC reintroduced in 1999/2000 primarily to organize the open access shelves and the national bibliography, founding of and participation in EDUG.
- Community involvement in Dewey development: Possible models for collaboration / Alex Kyrios, OCLC. Benefits and drawbacks of models under consideration: traditional model with editorial team taking the initiative and reaching out for advice, task forces of existing committees (e.g., American Library Association’s Subject Analysis Committee or EDUG), external librarian/expert pairs, passive reception of suggestions, crowdsourcing.
- What’s new in Dewey applications? / Tina Mengel, DNB, and Peter Werling, Pansoft. New features in German WebDewey (not now available in all versions of WebDewey), including improved display of DDC hierarchies and preview of subordinate classes, PDF view and printout of limited number of classes, drag-and-drop icon and marking of text in box headline, user name and date of change in institutional and personal built numbers / comments; how DNB's DDC Short Numbers are handled in the translation software and in German WebDewey.
- Making Dewey Data Actionable / Stephan Schindehette, OCLC (not present). Presented by Alex Kyrios, OCLC. Report on OCLC ontology project investigating use of DDC as linked data for faceted search, hierarchical search, cross-language search, cross-classification search, and collection analysis.
The morning of the second day there were group discussions of the role of Dewey Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee (EPC) and community involvement in Dewey development; linked data, including linked open data, licensing, and copyright issues; and classifying maps. Elise Conradi, National Library of Norway, represents EDUG on EPC. In the afternoon there was a business meeting.
Next year’s EDUG meeting and symposium will be hosted by the National Library of Sweden and held in Stockholm, tentatively in April.
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