Subject Cataloguing

The work involved in cataloguing the content of all incoming publications is distributed across the different sites of the German National Library, based on the Library's regional media processing principles.

Each publication is assigned to at least one subject class of the German National Bibliography. Besides keyword-based cataloguing according to the rules set down for the RSWK headword catalogue, there has also been classificatory cataloguing based on the Dewey decimal system (DDC) since 2007.

Nearly all publications are fully DDC annotated. Not included here are school text books, fiction and poetry, children's and young people's literature. Medical dissertations are catalogued on an intermediate level of the DDC. The publications released by the publishing trade, translations and works on German subjects (Series A of the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie) are also catalogued using key words based on the rules for the headword catalogue (RSWK). The authority files - SWD, PND and GKD - are used for this. The only publications excluded from the cataloguing process are those such as regional calendars, event programmes and price lists etc. (See: Media works not catalogued - current DNB practice).

Contacts for the individual subject areas, based on the subject classification of the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie (Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig) (available only in German)