With the implementation of RDA in Germany, the German National Library has been running a project for analyzing the possibilities of integrating the ISSN workflows by using RDA for cataloguing. The project’s aim was to merge the so far separated ISSN workflows for data and object into the general cataloguing workflow of the DNB and to reuse the metadata of the German Union Catalogue for Serials (Zeitschriftendatenbank) for ISSN records. The new workflow started at the beginning of December 2016.

IARLA fully endorsed Working Together to Ensure the Future of the Digital Scholarly Record – a statement by The Keepers Registry, a Jisc-funded service maintained by EDINA and the ISSN International Centre, that outlines the actions now required to tackle the evolving challenges of preserving and ensuring the long term accessibility of digital scholarship.

The statement sets out a series of recommended activities for publishers, research libraries and national libraries that can be undertaken to support archiving and preservation initiatives.

The French firm Progilone based in Lyons will assist the ISSN International Centre to build a new ISSN Web Portal and a Customer Extranet that will allow institutions to manage directly their subscriptions and publishers to track their ISSN requests.

On 12 December 2016,  Peter Burnhill (University of Edinburgh), Gaëlle Béquet (ISSN International Centre), Alan Darnell (University of Toronto) and Theron ‘Ted’ Westervelt (Library of Congress) gave a presentation about the Stewardship of the Digital Scholarly Record and the role of the Keepers’ Registry in the coordination of this preservation.

More about the CNI Fall 2016 Meeting

The 41st Meeting of ISSN Centres’ Directors took place in Brasilia at the invitation of the Instituto Brasileiro do Informaçào em Ciência e Tecnologia, which hosts the ISSN Centre for Brazil.

Exploitation of the open access model by unscrupulous publishers can seem a threat to the future of scholarly publishing. But the situation is not  as simple as bad guys vs. good guys. This is rather a natural outgrowth of the ease of publishing on the internet and the rise of OA publishing.

Regina Reynolds, Director of the U.S. ISSN Center at the Library of Congress, presented two papers: one about the project the ISSN International Centre and ProQuest are currently engaged in ; the second about predatory publishing practices. For more information

ISSN International Centre will attend the 30th Guadalajara International Book Fair (Feria Internacional del Libro) at booth GG26 from 27 to 30 November 2016.  The featured Guest of Honor this year is Latin America.

The German ISSN Centre is hosted by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. So far, ISSN have only been assigned by the ISSN German Centre upon requests from publishers. From December 2016 on, requests from publishers will still be processed. Furthermore, library staff employed at the DNB section for Acquisition and Cataloguing will assign ISSN to serials entering national collections via legal deposit. These serials will be recorded by DNB staff in the Zeitschriftsdatenbank, the union catalogue for serials holdings supported by 4,000 libraries across Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Serial records with ISSN will subsequently be retrieved and processed by ISSN Germany before they are provided to the ISSN International Centre via OAI-PMH. This challenging project is led by ISSN Germany in close cooperation with the ISSN International Centre.

For more details, read the paper Projekt  ISSN-Integration by Christian Schütz.

From November 7^th to 11^th, 2016, the RDA Steering Committee held its annual meeting in Frankfurt, at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Christian Schütz, Head of German ISSN Centre, reported on the activities of the ISSN Network.