Chiaroscuro: the UDC at the BPI

Through interviews of users of the BPI, the author studies their feeling about classification. The way they use UDC class numbers looks more like pinpointing on a maproad than understanding the code and its meaning. The public gives greater importance to shelf exploration and book examination and ignores the various tools for information retrieval. Actually the problem remains the use of the UDC by the librarians themselves: diverting it from its first aim - books arrangement on shelves -, they utilize it to obtain a highly sophisticated content indexing.
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