FID'S STANDARD REFERENCE CODE PROJECT AND UDC IMPROVEMENT PROGRAMME Available to Purchase

It is always a pleasure to revisit the London scene, even if the occasion is a symposium where one is asked ‘to put the case for the FID's new policy for a Standard Reference Code’, as if one were Counsel for the Defence in the case of UDC versus SRC. The symposium title seems to reflect disquiet, if not panic, in certain UDC circles as to the FID's intentions, but it is quite misleading if it suggests that the FID, after long years of promoting the UDC, is about to abandon—or even relegate—the system in favour of some new‐fangled and insufficiently motivated substitute. It is true that the SRC project has received most of its impetus so far from the FID Central Classification Committee (CCC), which is virtually equated with UDC, and that the small SRC Group was set up by the CCC on the recommendation of the FID's independent UDC Advisory Panel, but this is because the other relevant FID committee—FID/CR (Classification Research)—is essentially a broad study committee, only very few of whose members could be expected to work on the project, however interested they may be. In the FID Classification Department itself, which is mainly responsible for UDC revision but very much concerned with all indexing languages and their use in libraries and other information transfer or exchange systems, we have long been sensitive to the criticisms directed against the UDC and most other general classifications, which have partly led to the proliferation of special classifications and thesauri, and we have followed closely the trends towards combined use of thesauri with UDC or other classifications, as well as the still vaguely expressed needs of such projects as UNISIST for some simpler sort of standard referral scheme as a ‘macro‐switching’ device. These considerations have convinced us that both an improved UDC and a simpler, more balanced SRC are needed by the information community, and that each can play its own distinctive role: the UDC for detailed subject retrieval in traditional libraries or documentation centres; the SRC as a simpler means for linking or switching between relatively broad subject‐fields in major information exchange systems, such as that envisaged by Unesco and ICSU in their UNISIST project.