Since 2000, the All-Russian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information of the Russian Academy of Sciences (VINITI RAS) has been a full member of the International UDC Consortium (UDC Consortium, UDCC, The Hague, Netherlands). Within the Consortium, VINITI RAS holds the exclusive right to distribute the official UDC tables in Russian. This means that VINITI RAS is the only official source of up-to-date printed and electronic editions of the UDC tables in Russia and for the Russian-speaking community.
UDC — The Global Standard for the Systematization of Knowledge
Today, the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) is a global, multilingual system of hierarchical coding of knowledge, used for indexing and searching documents. This classification covers all areas of human knowledge. UDC keeps developing, representing modern progress in all fields of knowledge.
Short History of UDC
UDC begins its history with the Decimal Classification created by Melvil Dewey in 1876. In 1895, the International Bibliographic Conference in Brussels set an ambitious goal — to create a “Universal Bibliographic Repertory.” To achieve this, the International Bibliographic Institute (IBI) was founded under the direction of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine.
The first edition was published in 1905 as the “Guide to the Universal Bibliographic Repertory.” By 1933, the second edition was completed and received the name “Universal Decimal Classification” (UDC). The institute that developed it went through several changes: the IBI became the International Institute of Documentation in 1931, and later, in 1938, the International Federation for Documentation (FID). Since 1991, the development of the UDC system has been coordinated by the UDC Consortium, of which VINITI RAS is a member.
