Gottfried Rost

Ernst Paul Walter Gottfried Rost (born November 14, 1931 in Leipzig ; † July 7, 2000 there ) was a German librarian . As permanent representative of the director general of the German library based in Leipzig, he headed the German library from 1991 to 1996.

Gottfried Rost was born the son of the farm worker Paul Rost (1897–1950) and his wife Frida (née Lehmann, 1896–1949). He attended elementary school in Wermsdorf from 1937 to 1945 and attended business school in Grimma from 1945 to 1949. This was followed by employment as a temporary worker at the German library and attending the Berlin librarianship school, which he completed in 1952 with a qualification as a librarian at academic libraries.

Gottfried Rost grave in the south cemetery in Leipzig

In the following decades, Rost headed the signing service, the lending office, the university literature office, the working group of writers' bibliographies, the bibliographical department for German language and literature and was editor in charge of the bibliographies from 1966 to 1970 . In 1972, after a distance learning course at the Humboldt University in Berlin, he acquired the degree of a diploma librarian and received his doctorate there in 1975 on the subject of "The production of registering general bibliographies with the help of electronic data processing".

From 1968, Rost was in charge of electronic data processing in the Deutsche Bücherei for bibliography production. In November 1971 the first computerized volume of the German National Bibliography , Series C, was printed. From 1977 he was a library councilor and from 1982 to 1990 he was head of the computer-aided general bibliography department.

With the reunification of Germany in 1990, the German Library and the German Library were combined to form “The German Library” (today the German National Library ) with headquarters in Leipzig and Frankfurt. General director Klaus-Dieter Lehmann was in charge of the new institution . Gottfried Rost was initially Deputy Director General for Business Operations and Head of the Organization Department and, between 1991 and 1996, Head of the Deutsche Bücherei Leipzig and Permanent Representative of the Director General.

In 1981, the devout Catholic was appointed as a diaconate helper in the diocese of Dresden-Meißen and was allowed to hold word services in some outstations. From 1975 to 1999 he was the parish council chairman of the St. Laurentius Church in the Leipzig district of Reudnitz .

Gottfried Rost and his wife Maritta Rost (née Scheurer) had four children together.

Fonts (selection)

• The librarian. Treasurer or fodder? Book series historical job descriptions , Edition Leipzig 1990. ISBN 3-361-00265-6

literature

• Johannes Jacobi, Erika Tröger (ed.): Library as the elixir of life. Festschrift for Gottfried Rost on his 65th birthday. German Library, Leipzig 1996. ISBN 3922051774 .
• Hartmut Felsberg and Maritta Rost:  Rost, Ernst Paul Walter Gottfried. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 31, Bautz, Nordhausen 2010, ISBN 978-3-88309-544-8 , Sp. 1137-1146.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gottfried Rost in the catalog of the German National Library