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Research : Activities : DeweyBrowser

DeweyBrowser

The DeweyBrowser is a prototype system for searching and browsing millions of WorldCat® records classified by the Dewey Decimal Classification® (DDC®) system. The interface is available in English, French, German, and Spanish, and users can navigate the DDC Summaries in several languages (See DDC Summaries).

In addition to its multilingual capabilities, the Dewey Browser incorporates many characteristics of "next generation catalogs" such as tag clouds, faceted searching and navigation, and flexible sorting and display options.

Why we developed this Prototype

The DDC is the most widely used classification system in the world. It is built on sound principles that make it ideal as a general knowledge organization tool: meaningful notation, well-defined categories and well-developed hierarchies.

Libraries have a large investment in Dewey, for example, when weighted by library holdings, 70% of resources in WorldCat are categorized by Dewey. The DeweyBrowser can help users access these collections.

Outputs

More Information

Additional Resources

Project Lead




Most recent updates: page content 11 August 2009, prototype 11 December 07.

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This activity is part of ResearchWorks. Use of our prototypes is subject to OCLC's terms and conditions. By continuing past this point, you agree to abide by these terms.

Try the online demo

The DeweyBrowser, beta version 2.0, has a new interface and updated database. You can search for a topic or drill down through the summaries by clicking on a caption in the Dewey clouds. New features include the ability to filter search results by format, language of resource, and OCLC Audience Level. You can also search within a results set.

The interface provides the option of displaying the captions in one of several languages. Available languages are English, French, German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.

The prototype provides access to approximately 2.5 million records from the OCLC Worldcat database. The records are indexed and searched using Apache Solr. The prototype runs on a Linux platform, using the Apache HTTP and Tomcat servers.

Try it out

Go to OCLC Research DeweyBrowser

Sample Searches

Project lead: Diane Vizine-Goetz