Personennamendatei (PND)

In the Personennamendatei (Name Authority File, PND) all names of persons important for descriptive and subject cataloguing as well as for national cataloguing projects are brought together. Most of all it represents a service to avoid multiple work in building personal names headings  as well as in the unification of different forms of headings. Moreover, the PND is the reference file for international co-operation in the area of creating personal names headings.

The PND has been built up between 1995 and 1998 within the framework of a project supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and is available both online within the catalogue of the German National Library and - together with the Schlagwortnormdatei (Subject Headings Authority File, SWD) and the Gemeinsame Körperschaftsdatei (Corporate Bodies Authority File, GKD) on the Normdaten-DVD-ROM of the German National Library.

Co-operation partners are:

• German National Library 
• Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München / Bibliotheksverbund Bayern
• Hochschulbibliothekszentrum des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen
• Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund der Länder Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein und Thüringen
• Zentralkartei der Autographen der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
• Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg
• Verbund der wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken Österreichs
• and the SWD co-operation partners.

At the moment the PND comprises of roughly 3.6 million personal names (including about 1.8 million items for persons with differentiated data records) from the cataloguing departments of the PND co-operation partners and German National Library, from retrospective cataloguing projects and names originating from Eastern Europe and the Islamic culture area catalogued by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, from the music and maps areas, and from the personal names in the Zentralkartei der Autographen (Central file for Autographs) der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and from the names of persons within the SWD.

The German National Library applies the PND as an integrated authority file for the cataloguing, and links the authority records to the title records.

Information about  the PND (available only in German)