025.431: The Dewey blog

New Spanish translation underway

OCLC is pleased to announce that it’s working with Referencistas, a Colombia-based library services company, to offer a Spanish translation of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system.

Like other current translations (French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish, with Arabic on the way), the Spanish DDC will be continually updated in line with changes made to the English version. After the conclusion of the initial translation, the Spanish DDC will also be added to Dewey linked data and a Spanish WebDewey subscription will be available. The previous Spanish translation was a print Edition 22, and this work marks the first in Edition 23.

We’re proud to add Spanish to the family of DDC translations, and we’re excited to welcome Referencistas and their team to this project. I look forward to sharing more information about the availability of the Spanish translation of the DDC in due course.

Dewey at IFLA 2019

The International Dewey Users Meeting will take place at this year’s IFLA World Library and Information Congress on Tuesday, 27 August, from 10.30-12.00 in OCLC Meeting Room MC2 at the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre.

On the agenda this year:

• Violet Fox will give an overview of Dewey's community engagement initiatives, and facilitate small-group discussions about making the DDC more relevant in a multilingual, multicultural context
• Elise Conradi (Biblioteksentralen; EDUG Chair) will present on automatic Dewey classification in European libraries and implications of machine learning
• Uma Balakrishnan (GBV) will discuss the Coli-conc project, an integrated system for collection management and mapping
• Peter Werling (Pansoft) will show the latest technical updates to WebDewey, and preview right-to-left script support

Light refreshments will be served. Please click here to register for this and other OCLC events at the conference.

The International Dewey Users Meeting will take place at this year’s IFLA World Library and Information Congress on Tuesday, 27 August, from 10.30-12.00 in OCLC Meeting Room MC2 at the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre.

On the agenda this year:

• Violet Fox will give an overview of Dewey's community engagement initiatives, and facilitate small-group discussions about making the DDC more relevant in a multilingual, multicultural context
• Elise Conradi (Biblioteksentralen; EDUG Chair) will present on automatic Dewey classification in European libraries and implications of machine learning
• Uma Balakrishnan (GBV) will discuss the Coli-conc project, an integrated system for collection management and mapping
• Peter Werling (Pansoft) will show the latest technical updates to WebDewey, and preview right-to-left script support

Light refreshments will be served. Please click here to register for this and other OCLC events at the conference.

Dewey at IFLA 2018

The International Dewey Users Meeting will take place at this year’s IFLA World Library and Information Congress on Tuesday, 28 August, from 8.30-10.30 in Lounge 1 at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center.

Please join Elise Conradi, EDUG Chair, and Harriet Aagaard, EDUG Secretary, to hear an overview of the 2018 European DDC Users Group meeting. Peter Werling from Pansoft GmbH will provide the latest technical updates for WebDewey. You will also hear from Dewey Editors Alex Kyrios and Violet Fox, and from Caroline Saccucci, Head of the CIP and Dewey Section at the Library of Congress. Light refreshments will be served. Please click here to register.

Join us at the International Dewey Users Meeting at IFLA 2013

IFLA is around the corner ... at least temporally, if not necessarily geospatially. Ask me again after my 25 hour trip from Columbus, OH, to Singapore!

OCLC will again sponsor the annual International Dewey Users Meeting (formerly known as the Dewey Translators Meeting) in conjunction with the World Library and Information Conference (IFLA) in Singapore on Tuesday, 20 August, 8:00–9:30 a.m., Suntec Singapore International Convention Centre & Exhibition, Room 329.

The agenda includes updates on changes under discussion for Angiosperms (flowering plants), with an emphasis on taxonomy and common names, automatic abridgment of Dewey numbers as a Web service, handling edition metadata across translations and Dewey linked data. There will also be a demonstration of the new number building assistant in WebDewey (including how users can contribute/share their built numbers). Please register here if you plan to attend the meeting.

See you in Singapore!

WebDewey Deutsch and WebDeweySearch

Earlier today, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) notified current MelvilClass and MelvilSearch users about the official launch of WebDewey Deutsch (WebDewey DE) and WebDeweySearch.  WebDewey DE uses the same generic interface found in WebDewey and WebDewey SV (the Swedish-English mixed version of WebDewey).  WebDewey DE is the successor to MelvilClass, the web-based tool developed at DNB to provide access to the German translation of DDC 22.  The number building / user contribution tool that we've been writing about with some frequency since its deployment in WebDewey on 11 November will be available in WebDewey DE sometime later this week; our colleagues at DNB contributed mightily to the design and testing of the tool.

WebDeweySearch is an end-user browsing tool based on the look and feel of WebDewey and funded by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, National Library of Norway, and National Library of Sweden with the permission of OCLC.  The basic design of WebDeweySearch owes much to the original design of MelvilSearch, an end-user browsing tool developed by DNB.  The Swedish version of WebDeweySearch was deployed earlier this year (see Ingrid Berg's presentation from the International Dewey Users Meeting in August 2012).

International Dewey Users Meeting at IFLA 2012

Forty-two librarians from fifteen countries attended the International Dewey Users Meeting held in conjunction with the World Library and Information Conference (IFLA) in Helsinki on Tuesday, 14 August 2012.  I kicked the session off with a presentation on four topics loosely coupled under the heading of "new views of the DDC": Dewey linked data, the virtual 200 Religion browser, new proposed notation for expressing an archaeological viewpoint (comments are due on the proposal by 15 September), and the new user contribution / number building module in WebDewey (the beta version of the module is scheduled to be installed in the English-language version of WebDewey in late September).  Juli Beall followed with a presentation on recent and proposed updates to Islam and Islamic Law (comments are due on the proposal by 15 September).  Elise Conradi (National Library of Norway) discussed the history and challenges associated with the development of the new Norwegian translation.  Ingrid Berg (National Library of Sweden) demonstrated WebDewey Search, an end-user browsing tool based on the look and feel of WebDewey and funded by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, National Library of Norway, and National Library of Sweden with the permission of OCLC.  Finally, Karin Kleiber (Austrian National Library) gave an update on the activities of the European DDC Users’ Group (EDUG).  Karin is the current chair of EDUG.  Unfortunately, we ran out of time before she could link to the rich store of information on the EDUG web site—here is the link.  It is important to note here that the proposal for explicit notation to express the archaeological viewpoint in Dewey was a direct result of a recommendation from the EDUG 930 Working Group.

As it turns out, this happened to be the 10^th annual meeting of Dewey users held in conjunction with IFLA.  At the time of the first meeting (then known as the Dewey Translators Meeting and held at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin in conjunction with IFLA 2003), the German team had recently started using the Pansoft translation system that is now used by most translation teams, we were just introducing an XML distribution format based on our proprietary data markup (ESS XML), WebDewey only ran on the OCLC Connexion platform, and what we call "linked open data" today didn’t exist.  I managed to find the agenda for that first meeting in Berlin (thank you, OCLC data cloud!)  and was immediately struck (even with the level of technological change over the last ten years) by the similarities between the topics of interest back then and today.  At the time of the 2003 meeting, we were getting ready to publish DDC 22;  I gave an update on the status of the English-language standard editions.  Juli followed with a discussion of the translation guidelines for DDC 22 and Abridged Edition 14.  The late Magda Heiner-Freiling discussed the German model for the use of Dewey in national bibliographies.  Diane Vizine-Goetz (OCLC Research) discussed ESS XML (the predecessor to our current MARCXML distribution format).  There were also two roundtables: one on methodologies for terminology association between Dewey and controlled vocabularies, and another consisting of short reports from the Arabic, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, and Russian translation teams (with the exception of the Greek translation, representatives from each of the aforementioned teams plus the Swedish team were present at this year’s meeting in Helsinki). 

We are looking forward with excitement to the next ten years of working together with the worldwide Dewey community—see you in Singapore next August at IFLA 2013!

Women’s Soccer (Football)

The first round of the Olympic women’s soccer competition is under way today.  Yes, my local listing says “women’s soccer”; of course, the London Olympics web site calls it “women’s football.”  This got me thinking about our policy of interoperability and localization in DDC translations.  DDC translations are localized representations of the DDC in which the classes remain interoperable with the English-language edition on which the translation is based.  Translations are localized with examples and terminology appropriate to the country/language group, and are often supplemented by interoperable expansions (e.g., a deeper representation of a geographic area than found in the English-language full edition).

The DDC 23 class 796.334 Soccer (Association football) offers a simple example of interoperability and localization.  In the figures below, figure 1 shows the DDC 23 class in WebDewey (EN), and figure 2 shows the corresponding class in the Swedish/English mixed translation of DDC 23 in WebDewey (SV).  In either language implementation, 796.334 represents the same sport in a language-independent fashion; the EN and SV classes are interoperable with one another.  Notice, however, how the caption in the SV version has been “localized,” along with the Swedish Relative Index term.  Also, some terms from SAO (Svenska ämnesord, the Swedish subject heading system) have been mapped to the class.  (The SV version is unique among DDC translations in that it also includes the English-language Relative Index terms associated with each class. This is because the Swedish mixed translation is based on a model in which the category descriptions are expressed in the vernacular to form the basic framework of the translation; classes from the corresponding English-language edition on which the mixed translation is based are ingested directly to complete the hierarchies where needed).

Good luck to all 796.334 teams!

Figure 1. DDC 23 class 796.334 in WebDewey (EN)

Figure 2. DDC 23 class 796.334 in WebDewey (SV)

 

International Dewey Users Meeting at IFLA 2012

OCLC will sponsor the annual International Dewey Users Meeting (formerly known as the Dewey Translators Meeting) in conjunction with the World Library and Information Conference (IFLA) in Helsinki on Tuesday, 14 August, 8:00–9:30 a.m., Wintergarden Room, Helsinki Convention Centre. The agenda includes updates on Islam and Islamic law, data provenance, Dewey linked data, the Norwegian translation, and European DDC Users’ Group (EDUG) activities. There will also be demonstrations of the virtual Dewey religion browser, WebDewey Search, and upcoming enhancements to WebDewey.  Please register here by 8 August if you plan to attend the meeting.

Sweden Goes Dewey, Part 3

Left-to-right, interleaving all rows; from the National Library of Sweden, unless otherwise noted:  Maria Jansson, Eva Abrahamsson, Ingrid Berg, Anna Wallin, Tuija Drake (Stockholm University Library), Harriet Aagaard (Stockholm Public Library), Viveka Norström Hallberg, Olof Osterman, Magdalena Svanberg, Ann Tobin, Pia Leth, Madeleine Primmer, Kerstin Assarsson Rizzi, Pär Öberg, Anders Cato, Thomas Lindström (Göteborgs University Library), Viktoria Lundborg, Joakim Philipson, Helene Stenberg (Umeå University Library), Unn Hellsten; missing from photo: Jamshid Farahani, Pia Bodå (Uppsala University Library)

As previously noted (see here and here), the National Library of Sweden has spearheaded a movement among libraries in Sweden to switch from the use of the Klassifikationssystem för svenska bibliotek, commonly referred to as the SAB, to the use of the Dewey Decimal Classification.  In consequence of the National Library’s decision, the Swedish Library Association recommended that all libraries in Sweden consider adoption of the DDC; among those who have already decided to do so are all the major academic libraries.  (For more on the switch, see Magdalena Svanberg’s 2009 paper presented at the IFLA satellite meeting, “Looking at the Past and Preparing for the Future.”)

Presently, work on developing a mixed translation of the DDC in Swedish and English is nearing completion, and the Dewey Project team is planning how to provide DDC training throughout Sweden.  Part of their recent preparation included a week-long training course, using the basic course modules from the Dewey training site (more PowerPoint presentations and exercises will soon be mounted there; watch this space for announcements of their availability).  As the training presenter, I was deeply encouraged to see the level of understanding demonstrated by those taking the training, especially by members of the Dewey Project team.  Dewey is in good hands in Sweden, and we look forward to a long history of continued cooperation.

In a finding that should surprise no one, feedback on the training session indicated that a five-day orientation to the DDC is probably too intense for beginners.  Optimally, the DDC learner has the opportunity to assimilate the classification system by cycling through instruction and practice over an extended period of time.  (If you are a professional librarian and wanting to refresh your knowledge of the DDC, we invite you to make use of the materials on our training website.)  The Dewey Project team is considering distance education possibilities for follow-up training after providing introductory training in face-to-face mode.

International Dewey Users Meeting

OCLC will host the annual International Dewey Users Meeting (formerly known as the Dewey Translators Meeting) in conjunction with the World Library and Information Congress (76th IFLA General Conference and Assembly) in Göteborg, Sweden.  The meeting will be held Friday, 13 August, 16:00-18:00, in Swedish Conference Centre, Meeting Room J2.  The agenda includes presentations on WebDewey 2.0, the Swedish mixed translation, the expansion of 297 Islam under way in cooperation with the Arabic translation team, and activities of the European DDC Users’ Group.  Please register here by 4 August if you plan to attend the meeting.