Does convenience trump accuracy? The avatars of the UDC in Romania

• Main Author: Francu, Victoria
• Other Authors: Cordeiro, Maria Inês
• Language: en
• Published: UDC Consortium 2007
• Subjects: Classification
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/106107

This paper concentrates on some major issues regarding the potential of UDC and the current controversy about its use UDC in Romania: i) the importance of hierarchical structures in controlled vocabularies with a direct impact on improved information retrieval given by the browsing function which enables visualizing the hierarchies in subject areas rather than just locating a particular topic; ii) the lack of popularity of the UDC as an indexing and information retrieval language among its users be they librarians or end users of library OPACs; and iii) the situation of UDC teachers and teaching in Romanian universities.