This study day about ISSN facing the digital transition is organised by the French ISSN national centre, together with ISSN IC and ABES, the French bibliographic Agency for Higher Education. ISSN 40th anniversary is the opportunity to remind and illustrate the role of ISSN for reliable identification, access and preservation. The future revision of the 3297 ISO standard represents also the opportunity to gather the different stakeholders to discuss issues such as metadata production, workflows and exchange, online resources identification rules and interoperability of identifiers, at a time when linked data is becoming a reality.

This article, cowritten by Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Center, and presented during the IFLA Conference 2015, shows the essential relationship that exists between the communities involved in bibliographic description that has culminated recently with the work done on PRESSoo.

Latindex is a regional consortium created in 1995 and which manages databases about scientific and professional journals published in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal. The main catalogue provides a comprehensive coverage of serial resources both print and online with approximately 24,000 titles. A subset of this catalogue –about 8,300 titles- identifies quality journals sorted out according to editorial criteria defined by Latindex. Latindex also provides access to 6,752 digital journals categorized by themes, regions and countries. Latindex has been a partner of the ISSN International Centre for many years and both will renew their cooperation agreement during the 21st meeting of Latindex that will take place in Madrid  (Sept.29th to Oct. 2nd 2015).

The ISSN International Centre is pleased to announce the online release of the latest issue of « Ciência da Informação » dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the ISSN number. This special issue contains articles and testimonies on the ISSN’s history as well as an overview of the organization’s future challenges.

This release adds significant new features that will help research library staff make local collection management decisions such as a title list comparison service, a SRU and Z39.50 machine-to-machine interfaces, and direct linking to records.

The Keepers Registry Beta service provides easily accessible information about the archiving arrangements for electronic journals.

The US ISSN National Centre will give a presentation about the history and future of ISSN entitled “ISSN @ 40:  Past, Present, and Future” at the Library of Congress exhibit booth. Also, the ALCTS Continuing Resources Update Forum will feature three presentations about ISSN. To be followed soon on our blog http://40years.issn.org celebrating the 40th anniversary of ISSN network. Our blog is continuously updated with presentations and contributions from all ISSN centres about ISSN history and people.

Two workshops will take place as part of ICSTI (International Council for Scientific and Technical Information) 2015 General Assembly to be held on 4th July 2015 in Hanover, Germany. The Information Trends and Opportunities Committee (ITOC workshop) will focus on strategic thinking and future trends in open science and open data, and theTechnical Activities Coordinating Committee (TACC) innovation workshop will deal with innovative information products and services that make the STI more useable and accessible.

ISSN IC will also attend the 36th Conference of the International Association of University Libraries (IATUL), an Associate Member of ICSTI, organized on 5-9th July in Hanover, under the heading « Strategic Partnerships for Access and Discovery ».

AFNOR, the French standardization agency, and the National Library of France (BnF) organize on June 26th, 2015 a conference on “bibliographic transition”. Sylviane Tarsot Gillery, BnF’s general director, Gaëlle Béquet, chair of ISO TC46 (Technical Committee on information and documentation) and Pierre Fuzeau, chair of CN46 (French national mirror of TC46) will open this one-day conference.

The conference will present the issues of adopting new bibliographic models and formats, consistent with the FRBR approaches, to drive the participation of cultural institutions in the web of data. Even though the questions related to the adoption of RDA cataloguing rules in France will be specifically under focus, the discussions are intended for a wide audience, from libraries, archives and museums.

ABES Days 2015 were held in Montpellier, France, 27-28 May 2015. Among the broached topics: the implementation of RDA in the German libraries, FRBR and the bibliographic transition, ABES and the metadata environment.

On this occasion, Clément Oury gave a presentation on CIDEMIS, a new common platform between ABES and the ISSN Network dedicated to the assignment of ISSN for ancient publications.

ABES (Agence bibliographique de l’enseignement supérieur / Higher Education Bibliographic Agency) is a public agency which creates and manages information-based tools and services for the University and Research communities within the framework of the French national strategy.

The presentations’ supports and the videos are now available online (in French).

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