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Classification & Indexing Section Newsletter

Issue number 46 (December 2012) of the Cataloguing & Indexing Section Newsletter has been published. Contents include reports from WLIC 2012 in Helsinki and the IFLA Namespaces Technical Group, a look forward to WLIC 2013 in Singaport, and news and updates from UDC, DDC, and the Library of Congress.

Joan Mitchell to leave DDC

Joan Mitchell, editor in chief of the Dewey Decimal Classification, has announced her retirement with effect from 18 January 2013. Joan has been working with the Dewey editorial team since 1993, and has overseen the very successful development of the classification scheme and its supporting infrastructure through the evolution of the World Wide Web and the Semantic Web. Another significant achievement has been the globalisation of the DDC, reflected in the increase in the number of translations, the removal of legacy bias in the structure and semantics of the scheme, and the improved accommodation for multicultural views of the world.

Joan has been a regular attendee at the IFLA conferences, to further these professional goals and, we suspect, to enjoy the buzz of such a truly international gathering. We will miss her presence at the OCLC exhibition stand and the International Dewey Users Meetings – but we hope that she will be able to continue to participate in IFLA activities, especially in the Classification and Indexing Section where she has been an observer for many years. We hope to publish an article about Joan and her contribution to classification and indexing in the next issue (no. 45) of the Classification and Indexing Section newletter.

Meanwhile, for some indications of Joan’s achievements, see the presentations from the Internation Dewey Users Meeting at the last IFLA conference in Helsinki.