The DGD as a pioneer of information science documentation in Germany

What is it about?

From the very beginning, the board and management of the DGD (German Society for Documentation) assumed responsibility for documentation and information provision in the field of documentation and information. Content indexing as the basis of a central information service for the entire field of information science was carried out in the first decades until 1976 with the decimal classification. Later, a subject classification and a thesaurus were developed. Abstracts, bibliographies and title lists were early fixed components of the scholarly journal Nachrichten für Dokumentation. In 1971, the early “Information Centre and Library of the German Society for Documentation” finally became the “Documentation Centre for Information Science of the DGD (ZDOK)” with a dozen employees. Its services included research and SDI services, project, expert and institutional documentation. It participated in international documentation projects and in supra-regional loan transactions, was the national collection point for thesauri and produced the INFODATA database from 1976 onwards. In 1978, the DGD handed over ZDOK to the GID. ZDOK became the Information Centre for Information Science and Practice (IZ), which was last located at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.

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