Life has been a little topsy-turvy of late in Dewey editorial land. After almost 20 years at the helm as Editor in Chief of the DDC, Joan Mitchell retired at the end of last week. This week has seen the appointment of a new Editor in Chief. Quoting from the press release put out by OCLC:
Michael Panzer, formerly Assistant Editor, has been named the 10th Editor-in-Chief of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system.
Mr. Panzer . . . becomes the first DDC Editor-in-Chief from outside the United States.
Mr. 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.
“Michael Panzer is well known and widely respected in the worldwide Dewey and Semantic Web communities,” said Jay Jordan, President and CEO, OCLC. “We look forward to his making the DDC ever more useful, to paraphrase Melvil Dewey, in new and imaginative ways.”
Mr. 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, 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.
