We received a message yesterday from Magda Heiner-Freiling at Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) concerning use of Dewey in the German national bibliography. On November 22, DNB started using Dewey to classify all titles for the main series of the German national bibliography (excluded from Dewey application are fiction, juvenile fiction, and textbooks for schools). In other words, now all titles that are part of the legal deposit of DNB (plus Austrian and Swiss publications, Germanica, and translations) will be classified using Dewey. This represents more than 100,000 titles per year. Magda notes: “It is a huge step forward, and the project DDC German has now become a regular service. Of course it means a real challenge for us as we had classified mainly grey literature, reports and theses in 2006, and now we are confronted with the whole diversity of regular book trade publications. However, we can make use of many Dewey classes now which we never needed before. This shows the possibilities Dewey offers for everyday (non-academic) publications much better."
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