UDC is the brainchild of the two Belgians, Paul Otlet and the Nobel laureate Henry La Fontaine, who began working on a publication called ‘Repertoire Bibliographique Universel’ in 1885. Based on DDC. Dewey conceived his scheme to be applied to the arrangement of books on shelves, whereas Otlet and La Fontaine conceived their scheme to be applied for the retrieval of documents as well as for arrangement of books on shelves. The first complete edition of UDC was published between 1905 and 1907 in French language. Institut Internationale de Bibliographie (IIB), in Brussels, was the first publisher of UDC. The IIB later became International Federation for Documentation (FID) in 1929 and moved to The Hague.
The official working languages of the UDC are French, German and English. The UDC is published in different editions, like, complete edition, medium edition, abridged edition and web-based online edition. Presently UDC is owned by the UDC Consortium (UDCC) (1992). The UDCC publishes an annual journal, named ‘Extensions and Corrections to the UDC’.
TheUDC’s different editions are:
UDC Auxiliary Tables notations
UDC Citation Order: Thing – Kind – Part – Material – Property – Process – Operation – Agent – Space– Time
· The UDC Medium Edition (1993)
The UDC Complete Edition (2005)
The UDC Abridged Edition (2003)
· The UDC Online.
British Standard Institution(BSI) started publishing UDC English editions as BS 1000 series of documents. The UDC Complete Edition, published in 2005,contains over 65,000 entries and it is available in two volumes: Volume 1 – Systematic Tables; and Volume 2 – Alphabetical Index. Volume 1 includes main tables and auxiliary tables. The UDC Medium Edition (BS1000M) was published in 1985 and revised in 1993, containing over 40,000 entries. It is available in two volumes. The latest UDC abridged edition, published in 2003, contains over 4,100 entries. It was formerly known as the UDC pocket edition.
‘ + ’ connects two or more separated, but non-consecutive, UDC numbers to denote a compound subject.
‘/ ’ connects first and last of a consecutive UDC numbers to denote a broad subject, or a range of concepts, which may be called a consecutive extension.
‘ : ’ relationship between two or more subjects by connecting their UDC numbers.
‘ :: ’ (double colon) relationship between two or more subjects by connecting their UDC numbers, but it used to fix the order of the component numbers of a compound subject. The notation on either side cannot be reversed.
‘ [ ] ’sub-grouping device within a complex compilation of UDC numbers, in order to clarify the relationship of the components.
= language notation
(0..) form notation
(1/9) place notation
(=...) specific ethnic group or nationality
“...”specific date or time
* along with either 1/9 numeric or A/Z alphabetic notation from non-UDC sources to denote specific concept or thing.
(.00..) specific point of view.
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