The data you see in WebDewey today is part of Edition 23. So was the data when this edition was launched in 2011. Of course, it’s changed a lot in the intervening years, hence last year’s update to MARC fields for DDC numbers to provide date information.
There is no edition 24, and no plans to designate one. Keen-eyed users may have noticed that we launched the annual print-on-demand (POD) DDC in 2018, seven years after the release of DDC 23. Seven years was the typical period between printed editions. Coincidence? Well, yes. All print-on-demand DDC still uses DDC 23 data.
Now, in bibliographic terms, each new year’s POD version is a new edition, such as you’d record in a bibliographic field 250. And sure enough, there are records in WorldCat for each POD version to date. (Good job, catalogers!) But you’ll still see me scrupulously calling them POD versions rather than editions to avoid this sort of confusion.
As a historical note, this idea of multiple bibliographic editions for the same DDC edition is not unprecedented. Edition 15, for example, was initially issued as the "Standard Edition", but after negative reception, a "Revised Edition" was published, still Edition 15 in DDC terms.
Comments