The issue of IFLA Metadata Newsletter dated December 2018 includes an article about the activities of the U.S. ISSN Center under the News from the Library of Congress section. This article also mentions the 43rd meeting of ISSN National Centers’ Directors hosted by the Library of Congress in September 2018.

ISSN has been a persistent identifier for more than 40 years and still is! This is good news the Director of the ISSN International Centre will share with experts attending the two-day PIDapalooza Persistent Identifier festival in Dublin, Ireland, on 23-24 January 2019.

At November 2018 Wikicite Conference held at Berkeley, the ISSN IC Head of Information Systems made a presentation about ISSN and Wikidata.

Fifty percent of “periodical entities” of any kind have ISSNs in Wikidata, including 30,000 with linked article citations. Most entities lacking an ISSN in Wikidata probably have one assigned in the ISSN Register. The ISSN International Centre is ready to help curating ISSN data in Wikidata in order to fill the most important gaps and help with the creation of missing periodical entities.

The presentation slides are online, as well as the video.

The ALCTS CRS Continuing Resources Cataloging Committee is announcing its Forum, to be held on January 28th, 2019, (1-2:30 p.m.) at the ALA Midwinter conference. This forum will focus on the impact of the LRM and the diachronic works on serials cataloging using RDA, related LC-PCC policy statements, and how the concept of diachronic work relates to the practices of the ISSN Network. Regina Reynolds, Director of the U.S. ISSN Center at the Library of Congress, will be among the speakers.

Lille University and research centres GERiiCO and CIREL are organising a one-day seminar about scholarly communication in Lille on Nov. 28^th, 2018. The Director of the ISSN IC will make a presentation about predatory journals and the future of open science. The program is available at https://geriico-recherche.univ-lille3.fr.

WikiCite 2018 is a 3-day conference, summit, and hack day dedicated to the vision of creating an open repository of bibliographic data to support the citation and fact-checking needs of Wikimedia projects, and possibly, to serve as an open infrastructure for research, education, and information quality across the web. The ISSN IC Head of Information systems will make a presentation about the new ISSN Portal and investigate further cooperation with Wikidata.

On November 15, 1978, an agreement was signed between the National Library of Spain and the ISSN International Centre to create the Spanish ISSN Centre. As of November 1st, 2018, the number of Spanish records in the ISSN database exceeds 60,000, of which 8,893 describe electronic serial publications. An average of 1,500 ISSN are assigned each year by the Spanish centre.

[in Spanish]

Juha Hakala, Senior advisor at The National Library of Finland, chair of ISO/TC 46/SC 4 on Technical interoperability and author of various IETF RFCs on the use of URN for the resolution of bibliographic identifiers (NBNs, ISBNs, ISSNs, …) is hosted by the ISSN IC for a two-day working session (November 20-21, 2018) on the practical implementation of URN resolution for ISSNs.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the ISSN International Centre (ISSN IC) have just signed two agreements stating that the ISSN IC is the Registration Authority responsible for the implementation of ISO 4 Information and documentation — Rules for the abbreviation of title words and titles of publications and ISO 3297 Information and documentation — International standard serial number (ISSN).