Dewey Committee (DC)
Dewey Committee, Coordinator: Panagiota Dedetzi, on behalf of the Board of Directors of AGLIS: Anthi Katsirikou.
By invitation of the Board of Directors of the Association of Greek Librarians and Information Scientists (AGLIS), on January 17, 2021, the Dewey Committee (DC) was formed, as a voluntary working group, which consists of professional librarians, information scientists, experts in cognitive fields and workers in Greek Libraries.
The purpose of the Dewey Committee is to serve and provide assistance to Greek collections that classify with the DDC system. Specifically, the Committee focuses its efforts on rendering, improving, adapting, modifying and translating the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) for subject fields concerning Greece: (a) Greek literature, (b) Greek history – geography and (c) religion – Orthodoxy.
The Committee’s activities include: (1) identifying and filling in DDC taxonomic gaps for Greek subjects, (2) developing and modernizing the Greek Dewey taxonomic manuals of AGLIS, i.e. those of Greek History and Greek Literature, which are widely used by Greek collections, as well as (3) forwarding produced taxonomic work to WebDewey, used by the global library community.
In order to carry out the above activities, three task teams (TT) have been established under the Dewey Committee:
(a) The Religion – Orthodoxy Task Team (RTT), with the aim of developing the Christian Orthodox perspective and taxonomies in the DDC.
(b) The Greek Literature Task Team (GLTT), with the primary aim of supplementing and modernizing the corresponding AGLIS manual, “Dewey Decimal Classification (19th ed.), Greek literature” (Delopoulos, 1990), but also contributing to the development of Greek literature in WebDewey.
(c) The Greek History Task Team (GHTT), likewise, having the respective aim of updating the AGLIS manual, “Dewey Decimal Classification (19th ed.), Greek History” (Litsa, Fessa and Ledaris, 1986), as well as contributing to the development of Greek history and geography in WebDewey.
The ultimate vision for modernizing the AGLIS manuals of Greek Literature and Greek History is to form a modern online classification tool, dynamically enriched by Greek collections, which will provide a specialized Greek classification, as an alternative to that of WebDewey, simply because the Greek libraries have been using them to a significant extent.
In order to promote its work, the Committee holds virtual plenary meetings, while the Task Teams also meet on a more frequent basis.
Finally, the Committee gathers and maintains up-to-date, rich educational and informative material, in order to provide training and support to Greek libraries.
The Dewey Committee is open to anyone who wishes to contribute to the above goals. In order to contact the Committee, please use the following electronic address: epitropidewey@gmail.com.