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.

A training session will be held at the National Library of Kazakhstan from 3 to 5 April 2017 for colleagues from ISSN national centers in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Representatives of the Book chambers of Belarus and Ukraine will also participate in this training. At the same time, discussions will be held with the representatives of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia on the establishment of an ISSN regional center. A visit to the International Book Fair “On the Silk Road” is also scheduled for April 6th 2017.

The German National Library (DNB) organizes an information day regarding the topic Open Access (OA) for its staff. The OA days take place on 2nd March in Leipzig and on 9th March in Frankfurt am Main. The in-house training with OA experts -from the Universitätsbibliothek Regensburg, Kooperativer Bibliotheksverbund Berlin-Brandenburg, Copernicus Publications and Springer Nature- will provide (from different prospects) an overview and definition of OA and describe the benefits for science and research. New challenges and possibilities for scientific libraries, publishers and for the DNB in the near future will be highlighted. Kristina Eckl and Christian Schütz (both from ISSN Germany) will hold a presentation about ROAD: the Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources.

An encounter between the representatives of international organizations operating in France was organized by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development on 9 February 2017. In his opening speech, the Minister, Mr Jean-Marc Ayrault, mentioned France’s commitment to multilateralism, the promotion of human rights, access to education and preservation of cultural heritage. The Minister also announced some actions to ease the dialogue between French administration and international organizations to which the most favorable terms of French legislation will be applied. The challenges faced by international organizations shall be approached at the interministerial level. In her address, Ms Irina Bokova, General Director of UNESCO, rejoiced over the good cooperation  between her organization and the French Government, notably in the field of the preservation of historical landmarks threatened by armed conflicts.

The video of the presentation entitled Stewardship of the Digital Scholarly Record & of Each Nation’s Published Heritage given at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall Membership Meeting in Washington D.C., U.S.A. (Dec. 12-13, 2016) is now available on:
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/203130517
YouTube: https://youtu.be/9yprtDgwbEw

At 2016 Charleston Conference, Regina Reynolds, Director of the US ISSN centre at the Library of Congress, and Laurie Kaplan, Director of Editorial Operations at ProQuest, provided updates to several ongoing projects including the International ISSN Centre-Ulrich’s ISSN project, the revision of ISO-8 and the revision of the ISSN Standard (ISO-3297). Julie Zhu, Discovery Service Relations Manager at IEEE, presented the IEEE project to improve the ISSN in their metadata.

Their presentations are online.