THE DEWEY DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION - OCLC

Mitchell and Vizine-Goetz: The Dewey Decimal ClassificationINTRODUCTIONThe Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) 1 system is a general knowledge organizationsystem that is continuously revised to keep pace with knowledge. The DDC is usedaround the world in 138 countries; over sixty of these countries also use Dewey toorganize their national bibliographies. Over the lifetime of the system, the DDC has beentranslated into more than thirty languages.The system has value because of its well-defined categories, well-developed hierarchies,rich network of relationships among topics, worldwide use, and language-independentrepresentation of concepts. The existence of interoperable translations, mappings to othersubject schemes, and the large amount of categorized content already associated with thesystem also contribute to Dewey’s value proposition.BASIC DESIGNSTRUCTURE AND NOTATIONThe DDC structures knowledge by disciplines or fields of study in a general-to-specificarrangement in well-developed hierarchies. At the top level, the DDC includes ten mainclasses:000 Computer science, information & general works100 Philosophy & psychologyhttp://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2009/mitchell-dvg-elis.pdf Page 2 of 36.