Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Earlier this week I received an e-mail from the director of the ISSN International Center announcing a session at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim to talk about the “linking ISSN”. Abbreviated ISSN-L, this is a new addition to the revised ISSN standard (ISO 3297, published last August) that allows for the collocation of separate ISSNs under a single ISSN-L. The ISSN standard now explicitly states that an ISSN is a unique identifier for a specific serial in a defined medium. In other words, separate ISSN should be assigned to each different medium version of a serial. The ISSN-L table brings these separate ISSNs together.

This is a report of the presentations from the LITA Standards Interest Group at the ALA Annual Conference, 24-Jul-2006, in New Orleans. Pat Stevens, interim director of NISO, moderated the panel discussion.

ISSN Regina Reynolds, Library of Congress (U.S. ISSN Center)

Structure

There are 80 ISSN centers worldwide with about 150 people associated with the assigning of ISSNs.

The ISSN International Center is located in Paris. It assigns the prefixes to ISSN centers and holds a master copy of descriptive metadata — the “Key Title” plus other metadata elements in MARC format — for every assigned ISSN. It also provides documentation, a manual (about 80-100 pages in length) and support for new centers coming on board.