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82 Knowl. Org. 35(2008)No.2/No.3 Feature. Interview with Ingetraut Dahlberg. December 2007 Feature Interview with Ingetraut Dahlberg December 2007 Am Hirtenberg 13, 64732 Bad König, Germany <[email protected]> 1. Please tell us a bit about tries? Can you name a few influential colleagues (or your educational and work organizations) from outside the German commu- background. What got you nity who were of particular influence? interested in the field of knowledge organization? In 1964 I was offered a position for a year as Research Associate at the first university library in the US In 1962/63 I went through a which had a computer for its use, Florida Atlantic one-year course, organized by University at Boca Raton, Florida. Ed Heiliger, one of the German Documentation the authors (along with Schultheiss and Culbertson) Society (DGD) with the aim to of Advanced data-processing in the university library become a scientific documentalist. The course was (the famous “Silver Book”), was the library director. held at the Gmelin Institute because there did not yet Jean Perreault and I had the chance to work on the exist a university or polytechnic school for teaching problems of categories and relators, based on the Documentation (later called Information Science). We seminal work by Eric de Grolier’s book A study of gen- learned, among other things, to understand and apply eral categories applicable to classification and coding in the UDC as well as also the Colon Classification and documentation (UNESCO 1962). At the end of that of course indexing by subject headings or keywords. year I made a round-trip through the US, from Flor- After this course I was asked to take care of the book ida via Texas to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Yellow- collection at the headquarters of the DGD in Frank- stone Park, Mount Rushmore, Chicago, Cleveland, furt and to establish a documentation center there. I Albany, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. I visited did this until 1964. I found among the books the pro- the major documentation centers along the way, ceedings of the famous 1958 International Conference thereby getting acquainted with quite a number of on Scientific Information (NAS/NRC) as well as the well-known colleagues in our field of information sci- 1959 International Conference for Standards on a ence such as Don Swanson in Chicago; Jessica Melton, Common Language for Machine Searching and Trans- Barbara Denison, Jesse Shera in Cleveland; Calvin lation. I encountered for the first time the term “the- Mooers in Cambridge/Boston; Pauline Atherton in saurus” in a paper by A.F. Parker-Rhodes and in a pa- New York; Gene Garfield in Philadelphia; and Claire per by M. Masterman, R.M. Needham and K. Sparck Schultz in Line Lexington, Pennsylvania. I had already Jones. This inspired me to construct—according to met some of these colleagues at the ADI (later ASIS) my own ideas—my first thesaurus in the field of Conference in Philadelphia in October 1964. documentation. After my return to Germany I was made director of the Library and Documentation Center of the DGD 2. Originally, you were very active in the German with a number of collaborators (5-7) and a good an- classification community. When did you start to nual budget for buying books and collaborating with collaborate/confer with colleagues in other coun- other institutions such as the German Institute for Knowl. Org. 35(2008)No.2/No.3 83 Feature. Interview with Ingetraut Dahlberg. December 2007 Standardization (DIN) with its Committee on Termi- editing the current bibliography of the documenta- nology. In the following years, I also developed a de- tion literature for the DGD-journal Nachrichten für scriptor system for our documents on documentation Dokumentation. It was at the German National Li- which could be understood as sort of a systematized brary Conference in Hamburg 1973 that I met the thesaurus. In 1968 I was asked to chair a UDC com- publisher of my book, Klaus G. Saur and asked him, mittee on the revision of classes 03 and 04 to be de- “What about starting a journal on classification?” To voted to documents and documentation. Later on I my surprise he immediately said, “Yes, outline your compiled a faceted classification system for kinds of intentions and I will see what we can do.” So I did documents. In 1969 I was made a member of a small and the contract followed soon. In the first years we Working Group on classification, headed by D. had just two issues, later on three and thereafter IC Foskett, in order to outline the needs for this field in became a quarterly. the UNISIST program, to be established in 1971. Jean Claude Gardin was the author of UNESCO’s 4. How did ISKO get started? UNISIST Report, which contained also the request for a Broad System of Ordering (BSO). In 1972, at ISKO has had two prehistories: At the FID Congress the Budapest meeting of the Federation Internationale in Washington DC, Oct. 1965, I met Prof. Arntz, de Documentation (FID), a BSO-Working Group of Chair of the DGD and some German colleagues the Classification Research Committee was estab- (among whom Dr. Fugmann) and Arntz asked me lished, with which I collaborated until 1974. I brought about my one-year-experiences in the States. I ad- into this group my collection of subject fields and vised him that it seemed to me highly necessary to es- tried to convince its members of the findings of my tablish a Committee for Thesaurus Research. He was dissertation. However, the FID/UDC Committee had very open for this suggestion and immediately after likewise established an SRC-Group (Standard Refer- returning to Germany, already in November 1965 this ence Code) to serve as a BSO and since their solution Committee was established in Frankfurt with Prof. of a centesimal notation was—in a decisive FID meet- Martin Scheele as its chair and me as its secretary. ing at The Hague, 1974—to be combined with my so- Soon we decided to compile a book on thesaurus lution, I saw no future for such a monster-system. construction and each of the members wrote one of Thus the FID groups were dissolved and a small 3- its chapters. After a year, Dagobert Soergel joined the person team was to develop a result. Committee and Prof. A. Diemer became its Chair. In 1970 I left my position at the DGD and became Mr. Soergel was willing to compose a coherent book a consultant for two years for an Interministerial out of the somewhat differing styles of our chapters Working Group for Databank Systems in Bonn. At and the book, published by the DGD, became a best- the same time I began working on my PhD in Phi- seller in Germany. In 1973 Soergel began teaching at losophy at the University of Düsseldorf under Prof. the University of Maryland and in 1974 he published Diemer. My dissertation was entitled (translation a quite enlarged version of the previous German book from German): “The universal system of order, its on- in English (Indexing languages and thesauri: Construc- tological, science-theoretical and information science tion and maintenance), also a bestseller. Our work in foundations,” which was published in 1974 with the the Thesaurus Committee continued and we took in- (translated) title “Foundations of universal order of fluence on the German Thesaurus Standard and dis- knowledge.” In the same year I started the journal In- cussed questions of General Terms and Relationships. ternational Classification with Professors A. Diemer However, there were disturbances coming from some (Germany), J.M. Perreault (US), A. Neelameghan (In- people in the 1968 student protest movement and our dia), and E. Wuester (Austria) as co-editors. It also work was severely hampered. Thus, on February 12, had an international scientific consulting board. 1977, the German Classification Society was founded by M. Scheele (biologist, having created an automatic 3. What prompted you to start the journal Interna- indexing system and a faceted thesaurus system in bi- tional Classification? ology), R. Fugmann (chemist, who had created GREMAS, a very intelligent machine system for cod- It was for me sheer necessity, as I had all the experi- ing the elements of molecules and invented TOSAR, ences and the contacts necessary for such an under- an indexing system for the contents of statements), taking. During my work at the DGD Headquarters I H. Bock (a mathematician, who had published in had also been involved in writing the abstracts and 1974 a big volume on Numerical Classification), as 84 Knowl. Org. 35(2008)No.2/No.3 Feature. Interview with Ingetraut Dahlberg. December 2007 well as Dr. Schön, a librarian, and an economist. I change from IC to KO. Although we had our first In- (philosopher and somehow a universalist) convened ternational Conference in 1990 in Darmstadt we for- the meeting; the sons of Prof. Scheele and Dr. Fug- got at that Assembly to bring this name change into mann plus my son were also present. The election for the discussion. Thus it was only in August 1992 at the the chair of the new Society fell unto me, reelections next International ISKO Conference at Madras that kept me in this position until 1986, when Prof. Bock the change was approved, and the new name of the took over with me as deputy until 1989. In the elec- journal started with No.1/1993. In 1997 I sold the tions of 1989, all of a sudden the mathematicians in INDEKS Verlag to the ERGON Verlag, Würzburg.

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