The U.S. ISSN Center assigned a recordbreaking 6,341 International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN) in 2019, an increase of 10.5 percent over fiscal 2018. Of these, 2,621 ISSN, or 41 percent, were assigned to online resources. ISSN statistics over many years show that print resources continue to be published at a steady rate. The high number of ISSN assigned to publications requested by CONSER libraries in 2019 represented the successful elimination of an arrearage of more than 1,500 titles that had accumulated, partly as a result of libraries requesting ISSN for older print titles being digitized or moved to off-site storage. In 2020, the U.S. ISSN Center plans a project for more than 5,000 titles in HathiTrust and a project to assign ISSN to science blogs. Work continues on ISSN Uplink, an ISSN web form application, workflow, and communication system.

The portfolio of services provided by the ISSN portal is expanding to support the identification of continuing resources and share information about their preservation in the digital scholarly environment. Plans to make the ISSN portal a hub of identifiers are emerging. Bring your chords and your PIDs and tune in for an innovative music piece.

The Director of the ISSN International Centre gave a presentation with Peter Burnhill about Keepers Registry, the new service provided by the ISSN portal (portal.issn.org), at CNI Fall 2019 Membership Meeting. The ISSN International Centre has launched this service on 3rd December 2019. The Keepers Registry supplies information about long-term preservation of digitized and born-digital continuing resources.

The Keepers Registry, a JISC-funded service for the UK Higher Education sector from 2016 to 2019 had been maintained, so far, by EDINA at the University of Edinburgh.

The ISSN International Centre and its Governing Board value the Keepers Registry as part of the global identification infrastructure for serials. The ISSN International Centre has been a partner of the service since its inception. The ISSN International Centre will continue to make its functionality and content available for the international communities of libraries, publishers and scholars.

Since 3rd December 2019, the ISSN International Centre, in cooperation with the various contributing Keepers agencies, decided to take over this service by integrating the Keepers Data into the ISSN Portal. Please visit The Keepers Registry.

The magazine Research Information interviewed Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, along with other publishing experts, about the hot topic of “user experience”. The issue is available here, see page 9: http://email.europascience.com/files/amf_europa_science/project_26/RInov19_web.pdf?fbclid=IwAR30u6fUE1jtnm6BhjkVDNRzBRbgoteM8NYfIxBBw7oqrnHbHQPo_FQnAq8

On 1st December 2019, the national standards organizations members of ISO TC 46 voted and endorsed the revised version of ISO 3297, which will be released in 2020.

The 44th meeting of the Directors of ISSN National Centres will be held from November 12th, to 16th, 2019, at the kind invitation of the NISCAIR (National Institute for Science Communication and Information Resources). The Indian ISSN team is managing the logistics of the Directors’ Meeting. A dedicated web page (https://44thissnmeet.weebly.com/) has been set up to provide information for the attendees (on invitation only).

The ISSN International Centre is organizing an ISSN Regional Meeting in partnership with IZUM, the Slovenian Institute of Information Science (https://www.izum.si/en/) in Maribor, Slovenia. Representatives from Balkan and Central European ISSN National Centres will attend and share information about metadata issues, the ISSN Portal and the new metadata production tool.

The National Library of Colombia – National Center of ISSN held a Meeting on Serial Publications in August 2019.

Attendees learned about topics related to the revision of the Colombian Technical Standard 1074 on information and documentation, with reference to the international standard serial number (ISSN); the role played by open access scholarly journals, and the behavior of serial publications in the digital environment were also discussed. In addition, the importance and advances of the digital legal deposit in the National Library of Colombia were presented, as a mechanism that allows preserving digital documents for future generations. As a complement to this professional development day, there was a workshop on the process of preservation of serial heritage works, both born-digital and analog.

ISSN IC will participate in the 16^th International Conference about Digital Preservation (iPRES) by giving a lightning talk about the Keepers’ Registry (thekeepers.org) that will soon be added to the portfolio of services provided by the ISSN Portal (portal.issn.org). Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, and Peter Burnhill, Advisor to the ISSN IC Director, will meet with supporting archiving agencies attending iPRES on 19 September  2019.

Conference programme is available.