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Dewey® Services

Research: a vital part of ongoing development

OCLC is committed to ongoing research that enhances the Dewey Decimal Classification® (DDC) system for current and future users. The OCLC Office of Research has several projects under way to investigate many open research questions, including the ongoing development of the DDC, alternative structures, tools and rules for application, automatic classification and new uses for the DDC.

Knowledge Organization Research

The OCLC Office of Research has been involved in research on information organization using library classification systems like the DDC for many years. The expansion of the Internet is motivating OCLC researchers to explore new roles for traditional library information organization systems as knowledge organizing tools for electronic resources.

The Scorpion Project

Scorpion was a project of the OCLC Office of Research exploring the indexing and cataloging of electronic resources. Since subject information is key to advanced retrieval, browsing and clustering, the primary focus of Scorpion was the building of tools for automatic subject recognition based on well-known schemes like the DDC.


The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system is the world’s most widely used way to organize library collections. The DDC constantly updates to enable better discovery across any topic in multiple languages. Because the DDC is easy to use, you can increase the visibility of your materials quickly and efficiently.

Service availability

  • Dewey Services

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Learn more

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The Dewey blog is a great source for news and views on classification issues as well as interesting and unusual DDC resources and curiosities. It's also a convenient way to share feedback directly to the DDC editors to help shape the future of the DDC.

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All copyright rights in the Dewey Decimal Classification system are owned by OCLC. Dewey, Dewey Decimal Classification, DDC, OCLC and WebDewey are registered trademarks of OCLC.
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