ABSTRACT
To gaze into the future with a crystal ball is always difficult. Much has happened to the UDC in the last decade of the twentieth century, and it is unlikely that anyone predicting its fate even in 1990 would have foreseen the current situation. Indeed, the publication issued in that year - The UDC: essays for a new decade (Gilchrist and Strachan, 1990) - contains a great deal of information that became very out of date well before the turn of the century. The Classification, in particular its management structure, bears little resemblance to the situation thirty years ago when Geoffrey Lloyd wrote his chapter in Classification in the 1970s (Lloyd, 1976) though it is depressing to note that some of the revisions that he projects for the near future, such as Photography and Music, are still high on the list of problem classes needing urgent editorial attention. Equally sobering is the fact that many of the proposals that he made for the improvement of the scheme are very similar to those which conclude this present chapter. The UDC remains one of the more widely used of the general systems, especially in those parts of the world where English is not commonly spoken. It cannot, however, in any way rival its parent, the Dewey Decimal Classification, which has itself undergone many radical changes, both in management and in its approach to development in the intervening years. In Classification in the 1970s, Lloyd wrote that throughout the first half of the last century the two closely related schemes maintained their parallel structure to such an extent that it was possible for an institution to use them in conjunction with one another, with UDC expanding on the Decimal Classification's broader structure, without any great notational problems. At present, this is no longer the case in many of the main classes of the two schemes, but it is the ambition of the present editors of both to attempt to put the clock back,
94 The Future of Classification
in this respect at least, and to try to impose a greater correspondence between the structure and notational symbols used in the two systems.
