STATE OF The ENGLISH EDITION OF UDC

Abstract

The importance of systematically indexing technical information in whatever form it is presented — books, pamphlets, technical reports, articles in periodicals, abstracts, etc. — increases every day with the swift advances of science and technology. But so also does the difficulty of maintaining any classification or indexing system that purports to be reasonably up to date in every field of knowledge, especially when it is a worldwide system like the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), in which all modifications have to be approved internationally and are only authorized after a lengthy and often complicated procedure culminating in a rigorous final check by the Federation Internationale de Documentation (FID) at The Hague. Admirable though this may be in theory, it has, in recent years especially, fostered far too much ultra‐conservative — sometimes ill‐informed — obstruction to legitimate, urgently needed revision proposals, or P‐notes as they are termed. Partly as a consequence, publication of new sections of the full English edition B.S.1000, so greatly dependent on essential revision of terminology and practice in the English‐speaking world, has proceeded much more slowly than if B.S.1000 had been a ‘purely’ British Standard; so much so, indeed, that many users must have despaired of ever seeing in print the sections relevant to their particular subject‐fields!

Citation

LLOYD, G.A. (1961), "STATE OF The ENGLISH EDITION OF UDC", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 13 No. 7, pp. 182-184. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb049817