"5
great weakness of UDC in the field of geography is that a great
number of geographic sub-divisionspopulation geography, agri
cultural geography, urban geography have been systematized
under other divisions. The attention of FID was drawn to this
deficiency and a modified schedule was submitted by E. Meynen
a member of the Commission. This was accepted by FID and after
further discussions, particularly with the British Standards In
stitute, a final augmented version was published.
3.5.6 Although only a few classification schemes have been
discussed, there are very many others in existence. Many are entirely
satisfactory and widely used within particular countries. IBCC
carried out a study of Building Filing Schemes in 1958 and, although
it was concluded that architectural offices and building centres in
Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway,
Sweden and Yugoslavia make use of UDC supplemented by special
filing systems, attention was also drawn to a number of other
schemes 'of the greatest importance within the world of building'
The systems in question included the American Institute of Ar
chitects 'Standard Filing System' which was popular in Australia
and Canada as well as the USA; and the Cordonnier System.
'Classification méthodique des activités du Batiment de la Construction
métallique et des Travaux publics'whose many users in France
include the 'Institut Technique du Batiment et des Travaux
Publics'.
3.6 Punched Card Systems
3.6.1 In recent years some documentation centres have aban
doned the attempt to bring related documents together physically,
and have concentrated their efforts on the manipulation of ter
minology in files. The 'Uniterm' system of coordinate indexing was
developed by an American, Mortimer Taube. In its usual form this
system consists of a file of cards, one card per term, and on each
card the document numbers are listed in terminal digit order ie
the card is divided into ten columns, the first listing numbers
ending in nought, the second listing numbers ending in one,
etc. A search is conducted by withdrawing from the file the
cards for the selected uniterms and comparing the list of do
cument numbers to find any numbers which are common to all
cards. The terms used are of a very basic type, that is terms which
are elemental and not compound. From such units more complex
subjects can be formulated. The Central Building Research In
stitute, Information Division at Roorkee (India), use the Uniterm
System for articles in periodicals. The 'keywords' for a document
are written on the top of a reference card by a subject specialist
and the bibliographical details are added below. Reference cards
are then serially numbered and arranged numerically. The reference
card number is then written on the appropriate Uniterm card.
Where synonyms may occur, one term is selected and Uniterm
