>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
[ dead air ]
>> Good morning, everyone.
I'm very happy to see such a large crowd today for our presentation.
ISSN, Super Number for the digital environment.
I'm Karl Debus-Lpez, chief of the U.S. general division
and acting chief of the U.S. and publisher liaison division.
I'm also vice chair of the ISSN governing board.
I'm going to -- you're going to learn a lot about ISSN today
and the ISSN program actually reports to me within the U.S.
and publisher liaison division.
Before I introduce our invited guest speaker, Regina Romano Reynolds,
I want to make a few brief comments about the Library
of Congress's Digital Future and You Program.
The series of presentations is sponsored
by the Library Services Service unit at the Library of Congress.
In these briefings we highlight new, innovative
and indeed exciting digital innovations and initiatives
that are being undertaken within the Library Services
at the Library of Congress.
This presentation will be filmed and will eventually be available
on the Library of Congress's Digital Future and You website.
I want to remind everyone in the audience
to turn off their cell phones during the presentation
if you have them on, and there should be ample time at the end
of the presentation for questions and comments.
Now on to the introduction of Regina Romano Reynolds.
Regina Romano Reynolds is ISSN coordinator and director
of the U.S. ISSN Center at the Library of Congress.
Prior to the 2008 reorganization of the acquisitions
and bibliographic access directorate, Regina was head
of National Serials Data Program,
which was the former name of the U.S. ISSN Center.
Regina was a member
of the International Standards Organization's working group
responsible for the 2007 revision of the ISSN standard
that introduced the linking ISSN and you will also hear quite
about the linking ISSN at today's' presentation.
She is a member of the USRDA Test Coordinating Committee
and co-chaired an internal working group at the Library of Congress
that recommended Library of Congress projects based on recommendations
of an external working group on the future of bibliographic control.
Regina also co-chaired the working group
that developed the Concern [assumed spelling] Standard Record
and participated in the three international groups that revised
and harmonized ACR2, ISBD and ISSN rules to accommodate seriality
and electronic resources.
Regina is a frequent writer and speaker about ISSN and the future
of bibliographic control, and she has an AMLS
from the University of Michigan.
Now onto the more personal side, I've worked closely with Regina
for the last two years and I have to say she is a joy to work with.
I'm continuously amazed at her knowledge of librarianship,
not just ISSN and serials and electronic resources,
and her knowledge and expertise and how it is valued by library service
and the Library of Congress is indicated by the number
of important committees that she's been asked to co-chair
and be involved in over the last few years.
Beyond that she is obviously recognized nationally
and internationally by the broader library community
for her skills and talents.
On the subject of talent, Regina is a very talented speaker
and approaches her presentations with a certain artistic flair,
and I think you're going to enjoy this presentation because of that.
So without further ado I introduce Regina Romano Reynolds.
>> Thank you so much, Karl.
Now I have a lot to live up to but I'll do my best.
And I am delighted to see everybody here.
There's a little competition with an Alzheimer's program
but maybe those folks forgot about this one.
The other thing that I want to clarify before I begin is
to make sure everybody is here for the right topic,
because I'm not sure that Karl mentioned that I'm part
of the RDA Testing Coordinating Committee and our deadline
for the report was midnight last night and I'm very impressed
that Beacher is here nonetheless.
And so I am not going to talk about RDA, and in fact if you think
because I'm a little sleep deprived and have been in such immersion
that I'm going to let slip something about that decision,
my lips are sealed and remember
that President Obama has outlawed torture.
So but it doesn't take any torture to get me to talk about ISSN,
and so I'm delighted to be able
to this presentation with you this morning.
I'm going to start by going out on a little technological limb,
and I've already tripped myself up.
I have a little video.
It's something that I've gotten interested in learning how to do,
and it's about Mr. Title and Mr. ISSN, who are going to talk to you.
[ video played ]
So we learned there a few advantages that the ISSN has over titles,
and that is that the ISSN is unique,
and that it can be understood in any language.
And that it's eight digits so it fits
into a defined space in databases.
And then has a lot of potential in the future semantic web.
Now ISSN as a SuperNumber is sometimes hidden behind the scenes
like Clark Kent.
It doesn't always appear but for example in the Library
of Congress's find it system, we can see behind the scenes
that ISSN is providing some hidden power,
that link resolution is enabled by ISSN.
There is a UK digital registry of preservation registry that I'll talk
about later ,and it too works by connections using ISSN.
And this is a slide of a diagram that's made possible
by OCLC's ex ISSN service,
and the ex ISSN also works behind the scenes with ISSN.
Now I'm going to first give you some basic information
because I know although some of the U.S. ISSN center staff are
in the room and they know some of these things, there are a lot
of misunderstandings about ISSN, so if you know some of this, excuse me,
we'll get to the technology stuff down the road.
But in the meantime things to know.
It's about identification, and when I've talked to publishers
who are wondering exactly what is this good for it's easy to tell them
that the ISSN is a Social Security number of the serials world and just
as there are several Regina Reynolds in this world,
one of them does Patsy Kline imitations, I've found out,
only I have my Social Security or at least that should be the case.
So too with the ISSN, it's unique to the title.
In the early days ISSN was largely about being printed on publications,
and we can still see on well-behaved library publications
like library resources and technical services the ISSN is printed
in the upper right-hand corner just as the standard recommends.
In 1978 not long after the beginning of the U.S. ISSN Center,
an interagency agreement was made with the U.S. Postal Service
that has stayed until today and has really helped
to get the ISSN out into U.S. serials.
In '78 for the first time ISSN became a regulated in that
if a publication was mailed at periodicals rate and you can see
that periodicals postage paid statement,
back in 1978 they called it second-class mailing.
We collaborate at the U.S. ISSN Center with the postal service
and they actually fax us surrogates of the publications.
They get assigned ISSN and from then on in order to maintain
that lower rate, that periodicals postage rate,
they have to print the ISSN that we give them.
And this is the only case in the U.S. where it's actually regulated
by a government regulation.
I sometimes tell people when they get concerned in other contexts
that we can't really send the ISSN police after them,
but we encourage them to print the ISSN.
But these folks have to.
Now in the digital environment many, many more uses of the ISSN,
both for identification and as you'll see later for linking,
developed, so there became these packages of e-journals
in which ISSN helps to identify them.
Marked record services where libraries get the records to go
with those packages, e-commerce, where libraries use the onyx
for serials standard to send lists to a publisher
and get a list of prices back.
Of course, online access is facilitated by ISSN,
and in one of the very kind of mundane but useful aspects
if the ISSN is printed on the cover of a journal that's all
in Chinese characters or all in Arabic characters,
Chuck and staff can use those eight digits
to find the record in which to check it in.
Resource management systems use ISSN,
file matching so if I have a publisher file and a library file
and they each have ISSN those files can be mixed and merged
and matched by using this ISSN.
And in immersion use of ISSN that I'll be talking about is
in archives, now that libraries
and other heritage institutions are trying to preserve both print
and e-journals, all of these journals need identification
and the ISSN is in many cases already there, although going back
in time there is a lot that's still needed.
So here's a shot from the LCERMS, showing that it's got a place
for the standard number, namely the ISSN.
Now the ISSN, a very wonderful new use is in linking.
This is going to help connect all kinds of data and information
about journals, about authors of journals, and it is the power behind
that find-it service that allows the article to be connected
with the user and with the database that it's in via an open url.
And the linking ISSN, which I will be talking about,
helps facilitate that connection.
ISSN is also about inoperability in that it can be imbedded
in other identifiers like the DOI or like the EAN,
which is the European counterpart of our upc product code,
and as I mentioned it is also able
to be imbedded in the open url links.
And in addition to the ISSN interoperating
with these other standards, ISSN facilitates interoperability between
and among different programs, and databases.
Certainly there's a lot of collaboration involved with ISSN.
The ISSN network in Paris collaborates in projects such as
that peppers project that I mentioned earlier, the UC registry,
preservation registry, and in the U.S. one of the big collaborations
that I'm involved in is a working group
from NICO [assumed spelling] called Pie-J, which is going
to provide best practices to publishers for e-journals,
identification and presentation.
And certainly it's exciting to me
that ISSN is really now about the future.
This linked environment that we hear so much about
and the future semantic web are very dependent upon identifiers,
and the fact that the ISSN system already has
over 1.6 million serials identified lays a great foundation
for this future environment.
But ISSN is about the present too, and presently there are plenty
of uses and users of the ISSN that the staff
in the U.S. ISSN center hear from every day, from certainly publishers
who are one of the heaviest requesters of ISSN
but also libraries within the PCC,
digitizers who are taking print journals
and making them available in digital form.
As I mentioned, the U.S. Postal Service, bar coding agencies,
union catalogs subsection agencies
and magazine distributors rely heavily on the ISSN
and student union catalogs, and these are really not even all
of the uses and users of the ISSN at present.
So let's get a little up close and personal look at the ISSN
to get some of the basics clarified.
It's an eight-digit number, it's got a check digit at the end.
It always has the alphabetic prefix ISSN in front, and it's assigned
to a continuing resource.
And this is a quote from the international ISSN standard,
ISO 3297.
I can paraphrase that by saying it's a dumb number
and I mean that in a very kind way.
It doesn't have any embedded intelligence,
it's just the next number that's assigned.
You can see here that some ISSN do end in an X and that is
because there is that check digit.
It's calculated on a modulus 11 and any of the mathematicians
in the room might know what that means.
There's a calculation that involves a remainder
and when the remainder is 10 the Roman numeral 10 is substituted.
ISSN has a very broad scope, and it's being broader over the years.
It started out when most publications were print most serials
but it expanded to include those ongoing continuing resources
such as online directories, the periodicals directory,
online journals, plus one, CD-Roms, and long dead serials
that are now being digitized.
So the scope is a broad one.
But there are some misconceptions about what ISSN in
and it really does not confer copyright,
it does not confer trademark.
People think oh, once I get this ISSN nobody else can use my title.
That is not the case, it really doesn't confer any rights at all.
It's an identifier.
We're really not connected with the SIP program because SIP is for books
and ISSN is for serials, and sometimes we have
to have some conversations between the two programs to decide
who should assign a particular number
and sometimes publishers get feeling
like they're being batted a little bit back and forth,
and we're going to work on that.
It's not ISBN, because that's for books,
and that's assigned by the Bowker company.
It is not the same as DOI, the digital object identifier,
which could be used at the title level,
but is most typically used to identify articles.
And the ISSN can be imbedded in the DOI to signify the title
of the journal that article belongs to.
And it's not the LC control number, it's not the spy pad number,
which is used in the UPC.
So there are a lot of things that it isn't.
ISBN and ISSN sometimes get confused, and in some counties,
in fact in many of the national libraries around the world,
ISBN agency is right in the national library and kind of sits
across the aisle from the ISSN agency, but not in the U.S.
in the U.S. a commercial organization, Bowker,
who publishes Books in Print, assigns lots of ISBN to publishers,
whereas the U.S. ISSN center is located at the Library of Congress.
And just in case this isn't clear,
the U.S. ISSN Center is the only agency
in the United States that assigns ISSN.
So ISSN and ISCN, they seem like they're exact counterparts,
but there's some significant differences.
ISSN are assigned one by one by ISSN centers, and the metadata goes
into a central ISSN register which allows the production
of the ISSN portal that I'll show you in a while,
and the metadata that's created follows the library standard ISBD.
ISSN are allocated in blocks to publishers.
The publisher then assigns the individual ISBD at their discretion.
So sometimes there is more variability
in how ISBD are assigned, since all the individual publishers don't
always follow the rules as clearly as the ISSN centers.
There is no central ISBD registry,
although in the United States IS books
and print has the ISSN for U.S. books.
And the metadata that's created for ISBD is not really according
to library rules although it certainly can interoperate
and that's actually one of my little pipe dreams.
I want to investigate down the road how we might be able
to use the metadata that's created for ISBD
to perhaps help us populate our IDC recording those cases
where we might not have Onyx, which is another standard
that we're using for book metadata.
Now this is kind of a controversial aspect of ISSN that emerged
when digital materials first started coming to the fore
when online publications started coming out.
There was a decision made that ISSN, a separate ISSN would be assigned
to the online version, to the CD-rom version as distinct from the print.
And the subscription agencies, the people who regard an ISSN
as a product identifier such that the ISBN is,
well those folks were very happy.
Now the libraries and the knowledge basis
that are really more interested in identifying content, well,
they weren't very happy because they don't want three different ISSN
for what is essentially the same content.
So that's been a tug of war over the years
and the linking ISSN is that solution.
It allowed ISSN to come in two flavors,
so we've got the medium specific ISSN
and that's the plain vanilla ISSN.
You've got one for the brand, one for the online, one for the CD.
But this new strawberry cream flavor is the linking ISSN,
and one linking ISSN identifies the cluster of related resources.
So the print, the online and the CD all share the same linking ISSN
that have their medium specific and attempt
to have the best of both worlds.
Another controversial aspect of the ISSN is when they change.
Now ISBD changed with the publisher
because they have a publisher prefix.
Fortunately ISSN don't change with the publisher, because serials hop
around all over the place.
They are being bought and sold frequently.
But they do change when there is what is called a major title change
and the rules for major title changes are found
in the ISSN manual, in ACR 2 and in ISBD, and they were synchronized
in 2002 to 2003, and we are hoping
that they will stay synchronized throughout any updates and changes.
So these major changes of ISSN title do result in a new ISSN
and that has resulted in a complexity
in the digital environment.
In the print world once it was printed
with a certain title that was it.
It was fixed.
We're finding that in the online world,
publishers like to rewrite history.
So they take all the former content under three different titles,
they put it online under the current title and confusion results,
which is one of the things that Pie-J is trying to work on.
Now you might wonder where do ISSN come from, well they come from Paris
and it would be nice, I think, if every time we ran out of a bunch
of ISSN I'd have to go over to Paris and get the new bunch
but that isn't how it works and that may not be
so good for the travel budget.
So what happens is we get a new set of ISSN, a new block,
that come to us in a file from Paris, and we load them
into our AI-Air our automated ISSN register,
that doles them out to the next person.
There are 89 ISSN centers around the world,
with the headquarters in Paris.
And Paris is where the governing board meets,
so Karl has just returned from a governing board meeting in Paris.
That governing board determines high level policy,
it determines the budget and the organization of the network.
The ISSN centers are heavily concentrated in Europe
but over time we've been getting other ISSN
in South Amerce, in Asia and Africa.
Even some places as small
as the Seychelles [assumed spelling] now have an ISSN center.
And the ISSN network meetings, the directors meet every year
at the invitation of one of the ISSN centers.
At the invitation on one of the ISSN centers.
So I've been very fortunate and privileged to go to meetings
and places as far flung as Canberra, Australia, Beijing China,
and many of the more unusual countries in Europe.
When I'm comparing notes with people
who travel a lot I say bet you haven't been to Lubiana, Slovenia,
and I've usually got them.
ISSN centers have a lot of responsibility and these are spelled
out in the appendix to the ISSN standard ISO 3297,
but the most key responsibility is to assign ISSN
to that country's resources.
Only that country's, and in this global environment
where many publishers have become multinational,
that's presenting a challenge.
Elsevier, well they have a headquarters in Amsterdam,
they have offices in New York, they have imprints all over the world.
How do we decide who assigns that ISSN?
So there's a list in the ISSN network of multinational publishers
and they've been kind of divided among the centers.
So the Dutch center does assign ISSN to Elsevier serials,
the U.S. center takes care of Wiley
and [inaudible] and France's and so on.
But even so we often encounter a situation where hmm,
who should be responsible, and thank goodness for email.
We send emails back and forth, we resolve it because one
of the worst sins that can be committed
in the ISSN world is a duplicate assignment.
We do not want to assign one ISSN to an Elsevier title
and have the Dutch assign a different one.
That compromises the integrity of the system,
so thank goodness we're no longer in the Telex environment,
which many of you probably don't even know what that is but it's sort
of like a telegram that had to be done
in the early trays of the ISSN system.
Emails are pretty efficient.
So we built the register of national ISSN metadata,
which for the U.S. ISSN Center being part of the concert program is
within the CONSER database in WorldCat
and it's also within the LCILS.
Although U.S. ISSN center assignments that are
for titles not acquired by the Library are suppressed
from public view, so this is just a little note that if you're looking
to identify a U.S. ISSN, and you have access
to staff view you should look there.
Because the OPAC display will not show those
that the library does not acquire.
OK. And then we cooperate with other ISSN centers around the world,
partly to determine who should be responsible, and partly some
of our email discussions are about new technology
or recent one was how many ISSN do we assign
when this serial is online.
It's available in a kindle versions, it's available in a Nook version.
So the question of the granularity of the ISSN and how do we deal
with the fact that in the digital environment serials are diced,
sliced and broadcast in many different ways.
We promote the use of the standard, we communicate with publishers,
we assign, we work on linking ISSN.
And here are some folks from the U.S. ISSN Center,
and here's the webpage.
The webpage has a lot of good information,
but it can have even more, and one of the projects
for the upcoming year is to enrich this web page
with even further information about ISSN.
But one of the important aspects for publishers is
that they can get an application form, they can fill it out,
and apply for their ISSN by using the form here
that can look at the FAQs.
So the U.S. center of the ISSN network, interestingly in order
to be an ISSN center you have to do what's called Exceed
to the international statutes which in the U.S. happened way back
in the 1970s, but it's actually like a treaty that has to go
through the state department to allow
that country to have an ISSN country.
And by that agreement the Library of Congress hosts the U.S. ISSN center.
At the library, post the 2008 reorganization,
we have an ISSN publisher liaison section in the U.S.
and publisher liaison division, and we also have serials librarians
in the two serial sections of the U.S. general
that all assign ISSN to U.S. serials,.
And maybe in the future there are other who are working
with understand serials who might be able to assign an ISSN.
All kinds of courses, primary are publishers but also all
of the titles that come to a copyright that are acquired
for the library get ISSN assigned as part of the cataloging process.
The E-journal deposit titles are getting ISSN and I'll talk
about that later, the postal service, CONSER libraries,
we have a web form that libraries that form part of the CONSER section
of the PCC can request ISSN for the U.S. titles that they catalog.
Digitizers Proquest American periodicals series has been a
challenge for the U.S. ISSN actor who is in the staff were
in the process of assigning ISSN to 2000
of those titles I think ultimately.
Subscription agencies like Ebsco, ISSN centers worldwide.
So if the British ISSN center encounters a U.S.
that doesn't have an ISSN, they can ask us
to assign one, and vice versa.
And then there's a lot of future in archiving projects.
ISSN can be assigned prior to publication,
people call them pre-pubs and then we get the issue,
which is the follow-up to the pre-pub and update it.
Or after publication, it doesn't matter.
ISSN can be assigned to current publications, future publications,
and past publications so it's a large scope.
And ISSN center has these relationships,
some of which I've already mentioned, postal service,
going back to 1978, with the pro quest who has --
we have a contact with Pro Quest whereby they hire a staff member
who's here in this room, Eric Bergstrom, and he works half time
for Proquest and half time for the U.S. ISSN center working
on ISSN assignments, clarifying questions and problems
in the serial solutions database.
The international center can always be counted
on for giving us projects, and the current project
from the international center is to fill in the gaps of publications
that have print items to send, that have an e-version
on line and know quote E ISSN.
So we've got about 3,000 of those to work on.
There is really no end of ISSN work, and that I find encouraging.
The membership program is a future concept that's going
to start to be developed.
Right now we do not have the counterpart
of the ESIP traffic manager.
We don't have a way to manage those digital submissions and track them
through the ISSN assignment process,
and this is something that's really needed.
And as part of that we'll have a membership program
so that people get a password and we can control who has access
to that application form.
And for pre-publication ISSN, we could limit these.
There are many publishers who want that ISSN pre-publication
but they never publish and so we have kind of wasted ISSN
on the one hand and on the other we have extra work for something
that will never be published.
So we're working on development with ITS it's just right now
at the concept stage, but hopefully this will enable some efficiencies,
this will enable a publisher to either fill out an online form
or possibly to use a more batch friendly form,
possibly develop an Onyx format for ISSN applications,
where that metadata that they supply to us can be converted
to a draft record much as we're converting Onyx data right now,
saving us keying and making the whole process more automated
and more efficient.
Now in the digital environment the big killer app
in a way has been open url.
In university settings in research institutions,
the huge challenge is getting the user that has a citation
to an article connected not only with any copy of that article
but when a copy of that article that is part of the library subscription,
we don't want them to have to pay for something that's outside
of our subscription, and we want to make sure
that our subscription money is put to good use.
And it's surprisingly challenging to identify in which of the databases
to which the library subscribes that particular article can be found.
It depends on the title, it depends on the data
and range of that package.
Open url has helped to connect that user
in this case XYZ.edu student, with the article.
So he puts this database search.
First he wants to identify an article that might help him,
and he's looking for something in the bios database.
The database validates him because not just anybody can get access
to this subscription content, so it's a yep, you're a good student,
we can let you into this database, and then they look around
and say okay, I want this article for -- and it's about serials.
My friend Steve Shadle at the University
of Washington did this slide and you can see
that during the Bartley Malting this is about different kinds of serial.
They click the button to send the open url to the server
and then it returns the customized result,
the services that say we get this article in a variety of ways.
And the ISSN is a key element of making that connection
between the citation, the journal that it's in,
and the article in the databases.
So that kind of brings me to one of the reasons
for the development of the linking ISSN.
Because in those article databases,
some publishers might have been using the print ISSN,
some might have been using the E-ISSN,
some might have even been using an ISSN from a CD-rom.
We couldn't' really depend
on publishers getting all this straight,
and when the ISSN standard came up for revision in about 2005
in particular the U.S. committee through NISO,
national information standards organization,
gave a lot of pushback saying ISSN network,
you've got to solve this problem.
You've got to redo the ISSN standard in such a way
that we can get our open url knowledge bases
to make the right connections.
We need one ISSN and there was a lot of discussion in that working group,
gee, should we cancel all these extra ISSN.
How is that going to work?
And then the subscription agents and the magazine distributors
and all the people who used ISSN
as a product identifier they pushed back and said, no, no, no,
we need all this separate ISSN.
How are we going to make sure we're ordering the right thing?
How are we going to make sure we're claiming the CD instead
of the print?
And even within one library when we did a survey,
the people in reference wanted one ISSN,
the people in acquisition wanted three or however many they needed.
So the discussions were lively, the challenges were great and tone
of the solutions seemed a bit obvious,
just add a suffix to the basic number.
Wow, even my husband thought of that idea when I suggested,
you know, what are we going to do?
Oh, well, just add something at the end.
Unfortunately all those databases in the universe
that had eight characters reserved
for the ISSN, those folks pushed back.
The subscription agent said we'll go out and do this
if we have to redesign our systems.
They probably wouldn't have but we didn't want to lose them.
So enter the linking ISSN, which is at a higher level of granularity,
and which uses the first ISSN of any
of the medium versions it gets designated also
to function as the linking ISSN.
So basically it's the first ISSN and we have two new subfields
in the mark record, subfield L for the linking ISSN and subfield M
for canceled linking ISSN.
So how did this work?
All right, the print version has a distinctive ISSN as does the CD
as does the online but low and behold the linking ISSN is the same
for each, and in this case it's the same as the print
because that was assigned first.
So the linking ISSN is always identified in databases
with ISSN L prefix and not ISSN should be stored in separate indexes
and has done a lot to solve the problem.
It's not perfect
because implementers never implement something perfectly.
Here's an example of how it looks in a marked record.
You see in the O22 L field, and the O22 is the ISSN N field,
there is the ISSN linking, the 776 fields give you the ISSN
of the other medium versions.
Where do you get ISSN L?
they are designated at the ISSN international center in Paris
when the records that we create every week go by ftp to Paris
and when they enter their database the first one that gets
in gets the linking ISSN to be the one that will be used for all future
that are linked through those 776 fields.
And one of the things that the ISSN network did
to make the ISSN L more available was
to make them tables freely available, so that any organization
that already had their database populated with ISSN,
plain vanilla ISSN, could use the free tables to say all right,
this ISSN has this linking ISSN and these have been freely available
and are updated quarterly.
For example the national library
of medicine was a very early implementer of ISSN L
and used these tables to populate not only their opact
but also their references in club med and other
of their databases with the linking ISSN.
This is of course, a graphic representation the tables are not
very human readable.
Now I mentioned that the ISSN was also an enabler of interoperability.
Here is an illustration of how the ISSN would look imbedded in open url
and it would look imbedded in a DOI and you can see this
in particular these illustrations show the linking ISSN
so you can see ISSN L equals but the same can go
for the regular ISSN as well.
and as part of the EAN barcode, I have another slide that shows that.
Barcodes are another big use of the ISSN, particularly in Europe.
I'm never sure whether I think it's a good idea or a bad idea
that in the U.S. the upc barcode does not use the ISSN.
We I think at the ISSN center would be flooded with requests
for the entire little newsstand magazines and many
of which are not serials, they're time limited
but they're sold on the newsstands.
I know our French colleagues had to assign an ISSN to something
that was printed on a bread bag because it needed it for the upc,
there was some little daily bread newsletter or something
that they had to give an ISSN to.
Of course, in the U.S. some of you might remember way back
when we did assign an ISSN to a poetry journal on a t-shirt.
It started out being called t-shorts, we gave it an ISSN.
Within two issues it changed its title
to the cotton quarterly and then it died.
So the EAN 13 does use the ISSN and I will show you how that looks ,
nd there is a barcode developed
in the U.S. called sysag [assumed spelling] barcode and symbol,
and it is used by some in the library community
and it's unfortunate that it didn't become more widespread
because some ILS systems
like Chipoli [assumed spelling] do allow the library staff
to run a bar code reader over this and check in a serial because in
that code the enumeration
and chronology are imbedded as well as the ISSN.
And it's been one of those chicken and egg things.
It never caught on so a lot of library systems can't use it,
and I think with the e-journal revolution the interest kind of died
and what are we going to print on barcodes, on print journals anyway.
This is a French serial that does imbed the ISSN and it's in red.
And that barcode on those European serials,
or even ones that are distributed in the U.S.
but that originate in Europe.
ISSN network has a variety of products and services,
chief among which is the ISSN portal, but you can also get ISSN
as data files, and for people like subscription agencies and those
who need of a whole file of ISSN,
they can purchase the file and updates to the file.
A new service that I am very excited about has just debuted
and it's an AOIPMH web service, and this is a machine to machine service
and I'll talk about it in a second.
First, let me talk about the portal, because this is really the product
that embodies the ISSN register, the international database.
Library of Congress subscribes to this, it is updated daily
and there's almost 1.6 million ISSN records.
They can be searched by ISSN, by title, by publisher,
there is a quick search and a more advanced search.
It really has a lot of functionality.
And here is how you can get to it
through the e-resources online catalog.
It is under the Is, for ISSN portal, and it's onsite only.
It isn't a register of the database.
And I do incur encourage you all to make use of this product,
it has many, many ISSN from around the world, our colleagues
in Asia have been assigning a lot of ISSN in China, in Japan,
the French I think are the champions of ISSN assignment
and have assigned ISSN back to I think that first Journal de Savant
that was in one of the first journals that were published.
So it's a great tool and I encourage everybody to make use of it.
Now this OAI PMH service is a machine to machine service
and it's designed to allow by subscription a library,
a knowledge base, an abstract indexing service
to get periodic updates of ISSN data, and it could be refined
by subject area, because ISSN records all contain a Dewey number
for at least a bucket term kind of category.
So for example medical, this OAI service could likely be set
up by an institution to say I just want your medical titles
or I want your medical titles that began after 2000
or various categories or I want all the forthcoming publications.
Or I want all the ceased publications.
So it's an exciting way, I think, for knowledge bases to be refreshed
to be updated, to get the correct ISSN data without people
in those organizations having to look things up one by one.
The portal is a one-by-one lookup.
It does have a list functionality but it doesn't have the ability
such as OAIPMH of regularly and automatically getting data updated,
new data fees, new data included.
You can set it up for daily, weekly, monthly, and selected information.
So I am hopeful that with appropriate marketing that some
of the link resolver net knowledge bases, some of the abstracting
and indexing databases can keep their ISSN current and accurate.
One of the exciting collaborations that I want
to talk a little bit more about is Pie-J, because as I mentioned
to you, the problem of publishers of journals
in the digital environment moving all of their historic content
under the current title is causing great problems for scholarship.
Someone has a citation to a title that existed in the 1980s,
they can't find that title anymore
because it's all been put under the current title.
This effort is to develop a best practices document.
The document is going to be short, simple to the point and try
to put things in a positive way to publishers.
Do this, do that, and only occasionally we have to say,
and this is what you shouldn't do.
Consenting users to content is really the goal here,
and users right now are having trouble getting to their content.
So this for student, it's like midnight and the term paper is due
at 8:00 the next morning, she needs an article, she's working online,
just at a dead end, can't find it, completely confused.
One of the reasons she's confused is
that by moving everything the publishers have created
phantom citations.
These are citations that don't really exist
because they're citing something that was published in 1980
as if it was published in 2005.
It's very confusing to the scholarly community.
So in Pie-J we're trying to emphasize the importance of ISSN,
accurate, complete ISSN, to provide clear indexing information
about former titles so that my citation, which is from a book
that was published in 1995 can still get me
to the article in a 2011 database.
Ensuring historical accuracy.
Because the publisher can never wipe out all the citations
to when it was first published, can't recreate all of them.
And we want to inform publishers about what to do when they publish
in different formats, that they should be consistent
with their titles, and this is only a summary of some
of the main points in Pie-J.
that draft is almost ready for finalization and we expect
that Pie-J might be available, these best practices,
to the community maybe by fall or late 2011.
The other really exciting development
on the horizon is the increase in archiving projects
and the recognition that in these large archives, in these databases
where there are going to be thousands, if not hundreds
of thousands of titles, identifiers are critical.
And so there's been just now really sort
of feelers beginning conversations
about ISSN's potential use in archives.
So it can provide this identifier
for digitized versions of long-dead serials.
We see increasingly, just about anything that's ever been published
for scholarly research is over time getting digitized.
Needs an identifier, the ISSN system started in 1972,
so from '72 going forward, the coverage is reasonably good,
not perfect, but pretty good.
The coverage prior to 1972 except for the French is not so good.
Our French colleagues have the practice
when they assign a current ISSN to good the whole family tree
at the same time, which God bless them
if they have time and money to do that.
But pretty much in the U.S. we take it from the present and go forward
through title changes but don't back it all the way up to the beginning.
There's also off-site storage that libraries are doing
with their print journals or getting rid of them altogether.
The people that are moving the print serials
to offsite storage also need identifiers for them
so we've had an inquiry from a CRL print project
and there's also this speculation
that all those happy trust titles might eventually benefit from ISSN.
The Library of Congress right here has embarked
on a eight deposit project so that those titles that are only --
we're starting out with only e-form, those so-called born digital titles,
can be deposited so we can have that in the future because who knows,
I worry because the U.S. ISSN center has been assigning ISSN
to online journals since 1988.
Before the web, before the web there was ISSN for things in Bitnet
and those online networks that preceded the web and I am sure
that many of them have disappeared off the face of the earth.
Now they might be found in the Internet archive,
but that is undependable and sporadic and things get kind
of garbled in there sometimes.
So it's exciting that the library is going to try
to preserve this foreign digital content through copy write deposit,
begin with a very small group of selected publishers
and selected foreign digital journals,
but guess what they needed before they got started?
ISSN, and in most cases these were U.S. serials but there were a few
from the UK and our colleagues at the British library were able
to provide those needed ISSN quickly.
The question does arise if this project scales up very heavily
and we get we try to archive things that are
from a multinational publisher
for which the U.S. doesn't have responsibility
like for example Elsevier we may run into some challenges.
But I'll show it to you.
They are also in this project, which is a partnership
between the ISSN network and peppers [assumed spelling] that's located
out of Edina and the UK.
They're looking to assemble a board of directors to scale
up their funding to see how this project could scale larger
but data version is available now and it's an important milestone
in the history of this project.
The Argentinean ISSN center hosted a meeting some years ago
and they've often been represented on the governing board and I know
for the meeting that we had in Buenos Aires,
they did encourage others in the region or in South America to come
to that meeting to find out about what this process was all about,
and we may have had somebody from Peru, I can't remember,
but that is kind
of the international coordinating role that they do in Paris.
Yes?
>> How is it that ISSN ended up at the library but ISN did not?
>> Yeah, it's kind of historic.
I wasn't there almost, but not quite.
But my impression is that Balker was very eager for it and put the money
up and the U.S. probably said hey, we've got our hands full with ISSN.
I can't speak completely to it,
but in the UK I think it's also commercial.
The ISBN is used to be Whitaker.
I think it's just kind one of those historic accidents
that who stepped up to the plate first.
I do believe that Balker perceived this to be an enterprise
as opposed to a public good.
And I thought you were going to ask how is it that the U.S. didn't end
up with the ISSN International center and I'm sure it's
because we all wanted to go to Paris once a year.
But I think that was actually also financial and I should acknowledge
that the French government does support the ISSN International
Center to a considerable extent and so they stepped up to the plate
and therefore I think they feel
that they can ask all the other ISSN centers around the world for ISSN
because this historic wanting ISSN for absolutely everything
in their catalog has resulted in a quite a backlog
of titles requesting ISSN from the French union catalog.
They started the network with it, but who knows, our turn may come
with some of these archiving projects.
Did I make the linking ISSN clear enough?
That can be a difficult concept but it's an important one going forward
and I usually try to illustrate it about three different ways
to see that it gets across.
Yes, Cassie?
>> How does that affect our holdings records?
>> How does it affect the holdings records?
I'm not aware that it does.
I that's a question going forward as to how
in a future next general OPAC we might cluster and display if we get
into Ferber [assumed spelling] and Ferberized catalogs and that is one
of the burning questions of the day,
what Ferber level is the linking ISSN.
We kind of think it represents an expression but not all expressions.
It gets a little bit tricky but I think
in the future it may help group things for appropriate display
as it does in the ISSN portal.
You can click on a little family link
and using the linking ISSN you can get what's in that cluster,
but then also using the broader links in the record
such as those used by axis you can get the entire family tree
with the earlier titles, the later titles
and supplements the relationships.
Linking ISSN is limited to the same content in different formats.
So I think it's for future catalogs.
A question, yes.
>> [Inaudible] project that the French are doing [inaudible].
>> I knew I'd get that question.
Thank you that is a perennial question.
It is theoretically possible but I'm going to take a deep breath
and get this number straight.
There are 9,999,999 potential ISSN
and we international network are only in a third of the way
through the second million
so I personally am not going to worry about this.
Yes?
>> [Inaudible] slide showing the ISSN [inaudible] network.
[Inaudible].
>> Seven digits, you have sharp eyes.
The check digit is omitted in that configuration
because the EAN itself has a check digit
for the whole conglomerated number
so that you don't need the individual check digit from the ISSN
but that was a sharp eye there.
Anybody else going to stump me?
Yes, Cassie.
>> [Inaudible] but our ISSN center kind of [inaudible].
>> Hmm. That's a very good idea, and I can't say that we do
but good thinking and I think we could build upon a glossary
that the elect serial section has been developing.
They have either the standards for serial sections or the oops,
continuing resources, new terminology,
there is work that has gone on in elects to provide a glossary
of terms and acronyms because there certainly are too many acronyms.
I wrote an article for the elects 50th anniversary publication
overviewing the serials developments over the past 50 years and one
of the reviews commented that in two facing pages it was almost
entirely acronyms.
You just really can't talk about the history of serials without ISSN
and concer and all the rest of them
and we keep adding them so good point.
Kevin, our web master is here, Kevin Garner, let's think about that one.
Thank you.
Yes?
>> Yeah. [Inaudible] email the ISSN [inaudible]?
>> Another very, very good question.
That can fall into two categories.
That can fall into the U.S. titles which might get covered
through these archiving projects that are going to reach
into the past, that might get covered
by this current core e-resources project that we got from Paris,
which is saying oh, there's some missing ISSN here,
but coverage of the non-U.S. titles is a little bit trickier
because that would involve some sort of matching on titles.
See that's the beauty of the ISSN, you can match number to number.
When you try to match title to title it's a lot more difficult.
But a manual lookup process would probably be completely prohibitive,
so that remains I think for some future development
that would now enable that kind of automated lookup and population
and it would be a challenge with the languages
and the different ways the titles are represented in the ISSN database
versus our OPAC, but it would be nice, I agree.
For now the source, the most complete source
of ISSN is in the at ISSN portal.
Okay. thank you for your attention this was great.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov.