Universal Decimal Classification (UDC)

By the late 1880s, the fame of the DDC had spread far and wide outside the USA, especially after the first international conference of librarians ever held, in London in 1877. Melvil Dewey ‘puck-like put a girdle round the world with his damned dots … and with him library methods were carried from Albany to Antipodes’ recorded Ernest A. Savage (1877–1966), a famous public library movement leader in the UK. In 1884 two Belgians, Paul Otlet (1868–1944), a lawyer and Henri La Fontaine (1854–1943), the 1913 Nobel laureate for peace, conceived the idea of a ‘universal index to recorded knowledge’. They established the International Institute of Bibliography (IIB) and organized in 1895 a world conference on bibliography. This is considered the birth of documentation science, which reached its peak in the 1930s. The IIB later became the International Institute for Documentation (IID) and ultimately the International Federation for Documentation and Information, which closed down in 2000 due to financial problems after playing a historic role in the development of documentation, special and international librarianship. The aim of the IIB was to systematically compile a universal bibliography of extant world literature in every language. They came across the DDC and successfully sought permission of Melvil Dewey to use, extend and adapt it to suit their monumental bibliography, which grew to 12 million references by 1921 before being abandoned as a utopian task. (It may be mentioned that a few years later Dewey would deny such permission to the Library of Congress to adapt his scheme: take it as such, or leave it; do not tinker with it, was his curt response). With permission based on the fifth edition (1884) of the DDC obtained, the system was expanded, endowed with auxiliaries and other powerful synthetic equipment to represent multiple aspects ofmicro-literature. The system was officially published in three languages – French, German and English, in that order.

First issued in French as Manuel du Repertoire Universal Bibliographique in 1895, the first full edition appeared in French in 1905. The second Edition, again in French, was published during 1927–1933 under the title Classification Decimale Universelle (CDU). The third in German and fourth in English were begun in 1933 and 1936, respectively. The English edition, published in specialized subject fascicules, took about half a century, mostly due to warrelated interruptions.