Monthly Archives: January 2013

Michael Panzer has been named the 10th Editor-in-Chief of the DDC

Michael Panzer, formerly Assistant Editor, has been named the 10th Editor-in-Chief of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system.

Michael Panzer, who becomes the first DDC Editor-in-Chief from outside the United States, replaces Joan S. Mitchell, who has retired after serving with distinction in the position since 1993.

Michael joined OCLC in May 2007 as Global Product Manager of Taxonomy Services, and was appointed Assistant Editor of the DDC in March 2009. From 2002 to 2005, he headed the technical team that translated Dewey into German. He was the first member of a Dewey translation team to be appointed Assistant Editor.

He served on the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, and is currently a member of the W3C Provenance Working Group.

Prior to joining OCLC, Mr. Panzer worked at Cologne University of Applied Sciences, where he was team leader of CrissCross, a research project funded by the German Research Foundation focused on mapping SWD, DDC, RAMEAU, and LCSH. He has an MA from Heinrich Heine University (Düsseldorf) in German Literature with a minor in Information Science. He also attended the University of California, Davis, on a four-month research scholarship.

Cycling for Libraries

– a pretty unique “unconference” for all librarians and librarylovers –

from Amsterdam to Brussels:   18.-26. June 2013

This year we are doing about 400km and visit Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, Gent and The European Parliament in Brussels. And each and every one of the the places in between 🙂

The idea of this professional event is to get out of our usual habitat in the libraries, offices and from auditoriums watching powerpoints all day long. Instead we are boldly looking for more engaging, productive, innovative, co-operative and humane ways to meet up with our colleagues.

And more fun too. The group of 100, international librarians from two dozen countries on their bicycles is quite a thrill!

Learn more at http://www.cyclingforlibraries.org (or ask me/us), and we’re on Twitter with hashtag #cyc4lib, on Facebook and thousands of photos Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/groups/cyc4lib/pool/. Or you can just google for it.

 

Classification & Indexing Section Newsletter

Issue number 46 (December 2012) of the Cataloguing & Indexing Section Newsletter has been published. Contents include reports from WLIC 2012 in Helsinki and the IFLA Namespaces Technical Group, a look forward to WLIC 2013 in Singaport, and news and updates from UDC, DDC, and the Library of Congress.

EDUG Annual Meeting and Symposium 2013

The seventh annual meeting of the European DDC Users Group will be held at the National Library of Norway, Oslo, Norway, on 11 April 2013. The meeting will be followed by a symposium Building the future of DDC: Translations, technology and transition 2003-2013 at the National Library of Norway, Oslo, Norway, on 12 April 2013. Further information will be available on the EDUG website.

Joan Mitchell to leave DDC

Joan Mitchell, editor in chief of the Dewey Decimal Classification, has announced her retirement with effect from 18 January 2013. Joan has been working with the Dewey editorial team since 1993, and has overseen the very successful development of the classification scheme and its supporting infrastructure through the evolution of the World Wide Web and the Semantic Web. Another significant achievement has been the globalisation of the DDC, reflected in the increase in the number of translations, the removal of legacy bias in the structure and semantics of the scheme, and the improved accommodation for multicultural views of the world.

Joan has been a regular attendee at the IFLA conferences, to further these professional goals and, we suspect, to enjoy the buzz of such a truly international gathering. We will miss her presence at the OCLC exhibition stand and the International Dewey Users Meetings – but we hope that she will be able to continue to participate in IFLA activities, especially in the Classification and Indexing Section where she has been an observer for many years. We hope to publish an article about Joan and her contribution to classification and indexing in the next issue (no. 45) of the Classification and Indexing Section newletter.

Meanwhile, for some indications of Joan’s achievements, see the presentations from the Internation Dewey Users Meeting at the last IFLA conference in Helsinki.