In a year of exceptional growth of the ISSN Network, the ISSN International Centre is delighted to announce the opening of the 93rd ISSN National Centre in Lima, Peru, on August 24th, 2021.

The Peruvian ISSN Centre is hosted by the National Library of Peru and is the newest registration agency for ISO 3297, the standard for the identification of serials and continuing resources. Dr. Ezio Neyra Magagna, Director of the National Library of Peru, said, “The opening of the ISSN National  Center in Peru is a very relevant event for our country and our National Library in the context of the 200th anniversary of its creation in 1821. Many thanks to the ISSN International Center for its cooperation and guidance during the process of implementation in Peru.”.

Dr. Gaelle Bequet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, commented, “2021 is a very successful year for the ISSN Network with three consecutive openings of national centers: ISSN Ukraine in March 2021, ISSN Austria in April 2021 and ISSN Peru in August 2021. Our teams of information professionals in Kiev, Lima, Paris and Vienna have been instrumental to achieve this expansion. The recent commitment of the National Library of Peru to promote ISSN is a pledge of success for this persistent identifier in Latin America.”

Replay the opening ceremony of the ISSN National Centre in Peru (August 24th) via Facebook Live: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=5945722972165494&ref=watch_permalink

Watch this brief video originally prepared for IFLA’s World Library and Information Congress in August 2021, describing the activities of the ISSN International Centre. The video subtitles are available in 6 languages, which you can display by clicking on the CC symbol in the lower right corner of the viewer.

The number of open access scholarly journals has increased six-fold according to statistics published in the ISSN International Center’s 2020 annual report regarding the development of the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD) service. Publishers who manage a portfolio of open access journals wish to optimize the impact of these resources in indexing databases and improve their bibliometric indexes. Librarians and researchers want to reference titles that best meet commonly accepted editorial quality criteria. But what about the emergence of questionable journals? Their editors are more eager to cash in on author processing charges (APCs) than to provide a quality service to authors.

Dr Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN International Centre, chaired this session organized by IFLA Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section. The session included Mathias Astell, Hindawi; Ana María Cetto, Latindex; Kate Snow, African Journal Online (AJOL); Leena Shah, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). They presented the quality criteria they have developed and implemented in their respective services for the benefit of librarians and researchers worldwide.

Watch this session and view the presentations from the IFLA WLIC 2021 website (registration required).

Gaëlle Béquet’s introduction can be viewed on Slideshare.

Ten years after the publication of its Consolidated Edition, ISBD is at a crossroad. The Revision of the ISBD is taking place in a complex environment driven by diverse bibliographic and technological developments and pressing users’ needs.

There is on one hand the urgent need to extend its coverage horizontally (to a larger array of resources) and vertically (to more granular descriptions). There is on the other hand the strategic mandate to align the ISBD with the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM), to keep up with the developments in the bibliographic universe and achieve complementarity between IFLA standards. In addition there is the necessity to engage – with other cultural institutions – in the web of data and linked data and semantic web technologies.
In this session, experts of ISBD and bibliographic standards are presenting their views that are driving the transition of the ISBD. Elena Escolano Rodríguez, Head of the Central Library at the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, presented an update of ISBD as the response to the communities of users to solve their needs of information; Mikael Wetterström, Specialist in Automated Processing of Bibliographic Data at ISSN International Centre, presented the ISBD revision work done so far by the ISBD for Manifestation Task Force. Gordon Dunsire, RDA Technical Team Liaison Officer, presented the position and role of ISBD in the current bibliographic universe, including its relationship to other IFLA bibliographic standards, RDA (Resource Eescription and Access), BIBFRAME, and linked open data.

The ISSN International Centre, with academic publisher Springer Nature, has just completed constructing a new, centralized process for the assignment of ISSN to periodicals and books series published by this publisher.

Read the press release.

The National Library of the Philippines has just launched its online application system for the assignment of identifiers, i.e. ISSN, ISBN and ISMN, to publications issued on the national territory.

This system is meant to provide better services for stakeholders and publishers.

For further inquiries please visit web.nlp.gov.ph or email issn@nlp.gov.ph.

For more information, you can watch this video.

ISSN International Centre will participate in IFLA WLIC 2021.

The Marketing team will hold a gold exhibitor virtual booth accessible through the exhibitors section. The showcase page will enable delegates to network with private, direct chat functions.

The Metadata department will be represented by Mikael Wetterstöm. As a liaison officer of the ISBD Review Group, he has an active part in the ISBD for Manifestation Task Force to review ISBD in the context of alignment with IFLA LRM model. He will present the revision work done so far by the group about the evolution of the data elements.  More information on IFLA website ISBD in transition.

The Keepers Registry has registered a significant increase of periodicals archived by the Chinese National Digital Preservation Programme for Scientific Literature, NDPP.

NDPP China is funded by National Science & Technology Library placed under the umbrellla of the Ministry of Science and Technology, China.  More than 200 research and academic libraries participate in this programme, operating with multiple preserving nodes at major institutions.
NDPP strives to promote research and practice of digital resource preservation in China, and also looks forward to exchange and cooperation with international experts and institutions.