025.431: The Dewey blog

Apply to be the 2023 DDC intern

I'm very excited to announce the second DDC Editor in Residence, the program that began this year with Kelly West! This iteration of the program will be a full-time internship running May through August 2023.

You can find the full position description on the OCLC jobs page. To summarize, we're looking for a current MLIS student or recent grad who will choose a topic area of interest, review the DDC's coverage, and create one or more proposals to improve the classification. The candidate will work with me and EPC to do so.

We plan to have this position be in person, based out of the Library of Congress, with some flexibility. Note that the position description says "U.S. Work from Home" only because the Library of Congress is not an OCLC office, and that we are aiming for in-person work.

There is no set deadline for this position, so if you or anyone you know is interested, I encourage you to apply!

DDC editions: what’s in a name?

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.