CONCLUSIONS

The discussion may be summed up under four headings, only one of which is classification; the other three are Politics, Finance and Management. We may begin with Politics, for many of the problems have their basis in politics. There is a sense of dissatisfaction with UDC among a number of important people: important, that is, in the sense that their views carry weight in international circles. In 1948 the Royal Society's Scientific Information Conference came to the conclusion (as a similar meeting did in 1896 in relation to Dewey's classification) that there was no satisfactory classification for science and technology, and that they would easily solve the problem by devoting a little thought to it; we are still awaiting their results. The UNISIST meetings were again largely meetings of scientists; Dr Coblans has assured us that they did not in fact come to any definite conclusions, but one gets the feeling that many of those present did not favour UDC. There is already some feeling—stemming I believe largely from ignorance—in the United States that UDC is not the scheme they are looking for; very few libraries there use it, and there is no guarantee that it would become popular even if the full English edition became available. The Eastern Europeans use UDC, but would they welcome the suggestion that the English edition should become the key edition?