The ISSN International Centre participated in the Annual Conference organized by the French Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education (ABES) in Montpellier (France) from 10 to 11th May 2017. ABES is the French public agency which creates and manages information systems and services for the French academic and research community. The presentations and videos of the plenary meetings are now available online.

On May 12^th, the ISSN International Centre was represented at the Annual Meeting for managers of French regional centres specialized in serial identification (Centres SUDOC-PS). The current activities of the ISSN network were presented.

The Committee internal ballot on the revision of ISO 3297 was closed on April 9^th, 2017 and the revision was approved by 17 members. WG5, the Working Group that will conduct any revision of ISO 3297, Information and documentation — International standard serial number (ISSN), thus has the permission of this committee to go ahead with a revision of the standard based on the results of the systematic review ballot. The scope of the standard remains unchanged. Ms. Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, will be the project leader. The timeline for the revision is 36 months.

A meeting was organized on April 3rd and 4th, 2017 at the National Library of Kazakhstan in Almaty between representatives of the ISSN International Centre, Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation to discuss the terms under which a Regional Centre could be set up at the Russian ISSN Centre with the Book Chamber of Belarus and the National Library of Kazakhstan signing agreements with the Russian ISSN Centre. The Book Chamber of Belarus and the National Library of Kazakhstan have been attempting for several years to join the ISSN network but the two organizations have faced some administrative issues preventing them to be officially appointed by their governments. The Book Chamber of Russia became the 89^th ISSN National Centre in 2015 after the official accession of Russia to the statutes of the ISSN International Centre. The Book Chamber of Belarus and the National Library of Kazakhstan are both convinced that serial publications published in their countries need to be better identified at the international level. They would like to enhance and speed up ISSN assignment to their national publications which are dealt with by the ISSN International Centre by getting more involved in the process. A formal agreement should be signed before September 2017.

Further to the ISSN Directors’ meeting that was held in Brasilia in November 2016, the ISSN International Centre decided to publish a Spanish version of its own website. The Spanish version of the institutional website www.issn.org is now online, thanks to the cooperation of our colleagues from the Spanish speaking National Centres.

The ISSN International Centre team met with the director of INIST, Ms Dominique Wolf, and her colleagues to discuss about future cooperation. The first step is to involve INIST with the testing of the new Corporate extranet the ISSN International Centre is currently developing. The next steps could include joint participation in conferences to inform publishers about the operations of the ISSN network as well as greater cooperation regarding ISTEX and CONDITOR projects which are conducted by INIST and other French organisations.

As the growth of content is almost certain to continue to outpace control by traditional bibliographic practices, handcrafted cataloging for widely available publications must give way to “semi-automated” and other bulk processes. New partnerships with data providers must be forged, library data must become connected with data produced by other expert communities, and even one-by-one handcrafted access to rare and unique items must be aided by more fully exploiting machine intelligence. For a linked data future, we must break our monolithic records and build the links, including ISSN, that will be keys to connecting users to good content.

Download Beyond Google: Transforming the Bibliographic Environment to Connect Users to Good Content

On the 6th April, 2017, ISSN Sweden hosted a Nordic workshop on the topic RDA for Serials.

Participants left to right: Hanna-Elise Hansen, ISSN Norway, Marja-Liisa Seppälää, Development manager RDA,The National Library of Finland, Carin Anell ISSN Sweden, Katrine Schröder National Library of Denmark, Anna Wallin ISSN Sweden, Ola Alm ISSN Sweden, Katarina Synnermark RDA-development, National Library of Sweden.

The secretariat of ISO TC46/SC9 has just launched a committee internal ballot to confirm the revision of ISO 3297 – ISSN. SC9 P- members are requested to vote efore 2 June 2017.

The ISSN International Centre is invited by the French Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education (ABES) to participate in the annual meeting with SUDOC centres specialized in serial identification and cataloguing. This annual meeting about serial identification and cataloguing organized each year by ABES in Montpellier will take place in May 2017 at the same time as the annual 2-day professional event ABES Days, whose programme is online.

Clément Oury, Head of Data, Network and Standards Department, will represent the ISSN International Centre.

The ISSN Register is at the heart of The Keepers’ Registry, the database managed by EDINA – University of Edinburgh and which acts as a global monitor on archiving arrangements for electronic journals made by a dozen memory organizations.

The website thekeepers.org, which reports 34,357 e-journals as being archived, was recently upgraded and new features were added. Users can now submit lists of ISSN / titles so as to check the archival status of different publications in batch mode. Users searching for an ISSN associated with an e-publication get a result that shows basic information about that title, even if it is not reported as archived by any of the Keepers’. Furthermore, a machine to machine interface (API) has been introduced through which external applications can query the database.