Application of the revision of the UDC Class 2 religion in Spanish libraries: the end of the religious bias? a study focused on Buddhism

Abstract

The class of Religion is one of the most sensitive and historically problematic ones of the classification systems. Considering this, the present paper has two aims: to verify the process of reclassification of the already classified collection and/or application of the revision in the collection to be classified after the publication of the last revised edition of the UDC in Spanish libraries; and to examine the implications of the omission or presence of the application of this revision with respect to access, search, and retrieval of information. We studied the collection of monographs of the Spanish Bibliography and the Network of Spanish University Libraries (Rebiun), and more specifically the notation of the 080 field of the MARC record with the assignment of the call number according to the UDC and, therefore, of its physical location on the shelf. The review of the online Spanish Bibliography focuses on the monographs on religion (class 2) for the period 2007-2018 and is based on the search for bibliographic records in the online catalog of the National Library of Spain. For the study of the integrity in shelving, an advanced search was conducted for the Subject field of the Rebiun catalog, accessing the subject index and searching for a standardized term in fields 600, 610, 611, 630, 650, and 651 of the records. We analyzed the results from the online catalog of the selected library, both the bibliographic record (MARC 080 label) and the call number to obtain an insight of the location of the collection on the shelf according to the UDC. The study focused mainly on Buddhism as it was one of the numbers that structurally changed with the last revisions. The results show that it has been preferred to maintain the integrity in the location according to the call numbers following the 2001 edition, so that the bias towards the Christian religion is maintained on the shelves of the selected university collections. The scatter of religions into differentiated classes, that is, the grouping of call numbers into 29 makes the Christian religion the dominant subject. Consequently, the lack of development or the minimal expansion of non-Christian religions on the shelves implies the loss of their conceptual and structural relationships, with the consequent possibility of loss in the retrieval of documents.