The ISSN International Centre Director, Gaëlle Béquet, talks about the ISSN Network structure, the digital publications’ stakes, and the future of the Organisation.

Article in French.

BnF and CIEPS have joined forces in a project based on batch automatic assignments of ISSN numbers to digitized periodicals titles, particularly those available in Gallica, on the basis of the print version of the publications concerned, already identified with an ISSN.

The task of the BnF is to assign numbers progressively to titles without ISSN. The titles concerned are those which have already been digitized (retrospective part) as well as those which were recently added to the digitization process over the last months (current part). It is therefore a long-term project which just started.

Since its inception in the 1970s, the ISO standard ISSN has remained an essential identifier for print and online serials and continuing resources worldwide. The main value of this identifier relies on the quality of the metadata provided by trained library professionals around the globe. The ISSN network, that currently comprises 88 national centres and the International centre based in Paris, will celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2015. A special issue of the journal Ciência da Informação (ISSN 1518-8353) will be published by the Brazilian Institute of Science and Technology Information (IBICT), research unit of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Brazil, to mark this occasion.

IBICT would like to collect contributions that will trace back the evolution of ISSN and discuss its place among the current ecosystem of serials publishing and information identifiers.

More information

Since the launch of ROAD, the ISSN marked as assigned to Open Access scholarly resources in the ISSN Register are systematically matched against the coverage lists provided by indexing/abstracting databases, registries and journal indicators. The matching is made thanks to the ISSN numbers. ISSN records are automatically completed by the mention “covered by” or by indicators when the matching is positive.

CAB Abstracts, Global Health, ATLA Religion Database and ATLA Catholic Periodical and Literature Index have been added to the list of ROAD data sources which now brings to 15 the total number of sources: EconLit, PsycINFO®, Scopus, Catalogo (Latindex), DOAJ, The Keepers Registry, SJR, SNIP, CAB Abstracts, Global Health, Linguistics Abstracts, MEDLINE®, PubMed Central® (PMC), ATLA Religion Database and ATLA Catholic Periodical and Literature Index.

The ISSN International Centre and the members of the ISSN Network are proud to work with these services whose participation in ROAD is essential.

ISSN integration is a project led by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) to bring together the ISSN assignment and cataloguing, as well as the acquisition and descriptive cataloguing of e-legal deposit of serials into one workflow. Then, in the course of 2016, the German ISSN Centre will assign and catalog ISSNs directly in ZDB aka Zeitschriftendatenbank, after mapping the existing metadata format to an interoperable one (MARC21). ZDB, the German union catalog for serials, is one of the world’s biggest databases for serials (journals, annuals, newspapers etc., incl. e-journals).

The ZDB actually contains more than 1.7 million bibliographic records of serials from the 16th century onwards, from all countries, in all languages, held in 4.400 German and Austrian libraries, with 13.6 million holdings information. It is maintained by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and technically hosted by the German National Library.

As one of the results, metadata exchanges with publishers will be facilitated, noticeably with Springer, who represents 40% of ISSN assignments for pre-publications in Germany.

The FRBR Review Group (IFLA, International Federation of Library Associations) has reviewed the PRESSoo model and has endorsed it as a valid and useful extension of the FRBRoo model.

PRESSoo is devoted to the bibliographic information relating to serials and continuing resources. It has been developed by a working group made up by representatives of both the ISSN International Centre (ISSN IC) and the ISSN Review Group and representatives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). PRESSoo aims to propose answers to long standing issues with the application of the FRBR family of models to serials and continuing resources.

More on the FRBR Review Group

Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre has chaired the 41st ISO/TC 46 Plenary Meeting on May 5 – 9, 2014 in Washington, D.C.

TC 46 is a worldwide gathering of experts and information specialists in records management, data exchange, metadata, and library and publishing systems.

ROAD is a service offered by the ISSN International Centre with the support of the UNESCO / Communication and Information Sector.

A presentation has been given by François-Xavier Pelegrin (Head of the Bibliographic Data Section, ISSN International Centre) at the UKSG 2014 Conference on Tuesday 15th April 2014.

The Powerpoint presentation

An article published in “Research Information” about ROAD’s presentation at UKSG

2014 marks the 40th anniversary of ISSN Canada, the Canadian national centre for ISSN. Forty years of successful cooperation among ISSN centres, and the sustained growth of the ISSN Network is an accomplishment worthy of pride and celebration for Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

The two latest keepers (participating archiving agencies), the Scholars Portal and the Library of Congress, has now been added to the Keepers Registry. In this way,  the number of titles listed in the Registry has greatly increased and, with the addition of the Scholars Portal from Canada, another country has been added to the geographical spread of keepers.