DDC in Arabic Libraries

1. DDC in Arabic Libraries Dr. Khaled Abd El Fattah Mohamed Egyptian Universities Libraries Consortium

2. Agenda • Classification in Arabic History • DDC in Arabic Libraries • DDC translation into Arabic • Major Modification • Differences among libraries in classifications • Translation Terminology • What do we need? • Recommendations

3. Classification in Arabic History • As Greece philosophers Arab philosophers have given too much attention to classification of sciences since the beginning of the Arabic and Islamic civilization. • They have translated the Greece classification of philosophy into Arabic such as translation of Aflaton in Cartyle and Aresto and others. • They also have classified human knowledge into different fields . • These categories has been used to classify books in the old Arabic libraries, as well as shelving them according to this different categories.

4. Examples of Libraries Systems • Kendy Yakoup ibn Ishak – Science Definition and Divisions. • El Fraby – Categories of Sciences • El Safa Brothers Letters of Ikhoan El Safa • Ibn Sina • Ibn Khaldoon • El Khoarzimi • El Nadeem – The Catalog - El Fahrest • Others

5. DDC in Arabic Libraries • Although DDC has been developed for serving the American libraries needs, it has been used in different countries around the world as well as the Arabic libraries since the beginning of the 20th century. • It has been used in different types of libraries (National, Academic, Specialized, Public, and school libraries).

6. DDC Curricula • There are curricula for teaching DDC in all the Egyptian libraries and information departments (15 departments). • 1 to 2 curricula in each department. • All these curricula focus on teaching the Arabic modifications and expansions. • The same situation appears in library departments in turkey and Iran.

7. DDC and National Libraries

8. National Bibliographies • It has also been used as the main classification system in the national bibliographies of the following countries: • Egypt • Iraq • Tunisia • Algeria • Arab countries bibliography compiled by ALECSO (Arab League of Education, Culture and science Organization)

9. DDC and Academic Libraries

10. DDC and Public Libraries

11. DDC as Information Discovering Tools

13. Why Do We need to use classification as discovering tool?

14. Some Remarks • Catalogors indicated that using different versions (edition, original vs. Translated) of Dewey makes reuse of classification numbers in the copy cataloging process difficult. • Use of different editions of DDC makes it difficult to search by Dewey numbers across catalogs. • The same book might have more than one numbers in the same results.

15. DDC Arabic Translation

16. DDC Translation into Arabic • DDC has been translated into Arabic since the beginning of the 20th century. • All these translations include modifications for some parts of the main tables and branches to fulfill the requirements of the Arabic Libraries

17. Modification and Expansion • Language, religion, literature, and history sections are the major parts which require modifications and expansions. • First endeavor for translating and modifying DDC initiated by the Egyptian National library in 1929. • It is incomplete translation focused only on main subject. • Most of the translation initiated by individual endeavors which caused inconsistency and incompleteness.

18. Issues with DDC • Different translation by individuals. • Inconsistency in the terminology of translation • Different version in the Arabic libraries which cause inconsistency for the classification of the same book.

24. Major Modifications

25. Major Modifications • Main Tables:

27. The same book has different classification code

29. Arab History

31. Other Countries Modifications

32. Iranian Modification • They added modification for the four major parts. • They have used the DDC’s introduction, instructions which suggest to add the initial letter of the language or the country for the purpose of expansion, e.g., the letter F for Farsi literature. Thus, 8F1 is for Farsi poetry, while 811 is for English poetry. • 4F0 is used to refer to the Farsi Language in the Iran translation of DDC.

33. India

34. History of South Asia and India

37. Turkey

41. Israel Modification • They are using 810 for American literature and 820 for English literature. • For the Hebrew literature they used the same classification no. in the original and add special code for the Hebrew and local collections.

45. Translation Terminology

50. Arabic Modification for DDC • Most of the modification focused on translating the complete version except two endeavors (Fouad Ismail and Mohamed El Aide). • Still individual effort. • Arabic Libraries uses different translations and modification which might cause differences in the classification of the same book in the same type of library. • inconsistency in the translation • No Frequent update for the individual efforts.