International Identifier for serials
and other continuing resources, in the electronic and print world

ISSN International Centre at ABES Days

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.

New features in The Keepers’ Registry

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.

The National Library of Kazakhstan and the ISSN International Centre organize a training session in Almaty (3-5 April, 2017)

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.

Open Access days at the DNB

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.

The ISSN International Centre invited by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development to a reception for diplomats and representatives of international organizations

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.

Regina Reynolds (US ISSN Centre) and Laurie Kaplan (ProQuest) at the 2016 Charleston Conference

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.

Integrating ISSN assignment into cataloguing workflow

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.

Research Library Associations Commit to the Future of the Digital Scholarly Record

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.