Library information provider OCLC, US, has named Michael Panzer, formerly Assistant Editor, as the 10th Editor-in-Chief of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system. Panzer is the first DDC Editor-in-Chief from outside the US. He replaces Joan S. Mitchell, who has retired after serving with distinction in the position since 1993.
Panzer 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.
Panzer served on the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, and is currently a member of the W3C Provenance Working Group.
Prior to joining OCLC, he 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.
In 1876, Melvil Dewey first published his innovative classification system. He established Forest Press in 1911 to edit, publish and distribute the classification. Since then, the Dewey Decimal Classification system has been continuously revised to keep pace with the ever-expanding realm of human knowledge. Today it claims to be the world's most widely used library classification system with more than 200,000 libraries using the system worldwide.
