Alex_Kyrios
OCLC Staff
OCLC Staff

Last month’s WebDewey install introduced a few new features that help you track built numbers. Whether you have multiple users at your institution or are a single-person operation, these features let you compare your local built numbers to globally established ones.

You’ll find the new Built Numbers page at the end of the top toolbar.

It defaults to a list of all built numbers. That’s roughly 21,000 numbers, though the exact count will depend on how many locally built numbers you have.

You can access six other groupings of built numbers, all subsets of the “All built numbers” search.

Some of these may be self-explanatory, but I’ll summarize each. It will help to think of built numbers as existing in three different levels: personal, institutional, and established.

Duplicate built numbers: Any DDC number that’s been built at more than one of the above levels (e.g., personal + established). This happens frequently when a contributed built number is accepted. We don’t overwrite your local version, which could have helpful search terms, but if the duplicates are unwanted, you can treat this search as a to-do list. If this search gives you no results, that’s not a bad thing!

Personal built numbers: All built numbers created by the current logged-in user. Hopefully they will look familiar, because they’re yours! They display with a single-person icon throughout WebDewey.

Institutional built numbers: All built numbers created by anyone at your institution, including you. They display with a two-person icon throughout WebDewey.

My institutional built numbers: All built numbers with institutional visibility created by you. This is a subset of the previous search. Unless you’ve created duplicates, this will not include the personal built numbers.

Manually built numbers: All personal or institutional built numbers that used a manual process, diverging from the number builder. They display with a question mark and single- or two-person icon, as appropriate, throughout WebDewey.

Established built numbers: All built numbers available to any WebDewey user, having been reviewed and published by DDC editors. They display with a puzzle-piece icon throughout WebDewey. They also have URIs in Dewey linked data.

This content was migrated from 025.431 The Dewey blog in September 2025.

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