ISSN question
Hi All,
Below my email and Regina Reynolds' response to a lot of the points we can consider about ISSN, including Diana's point about E-ISSN. The below answers a host of ISSN basics, and addresses our project and how we might go about approaching the issues I conveyed in my below email to Regina. She does mention after some very helpful advice their not-so-cheap product which allows for a definitive search of ISSN (perhaps one of our partner institutions subscribes to this.)
I wrote back to Regina thanking her for the information, and let her know that we are not ready at the moment to add ISSN's to all our titles, but we may return with more questions when/if we act on this.
Matt
From: "Regina Reynolds" <
rrey@loc.gov>
To: "Matthew Person" <
mperson@mbl.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2016 1:50:36 PM
Subject: RE: ISSN question from Matt Person - Biodiversity Heritage Library
Hi Matthew,
It was so great to have your compliment after the holdings forum! Steve and I are good friends as well as long-standing colleagues and enjoy presenting together. Portland was a long time ago. You have a good memory since I don’t even remember exactly which presentation that was but I do remember a very good NASIG there.
Let me answer your question first in general terms and then get down to the devilish details. Yes, it would be great for all titles in that collection to be assigned ISSN. If they are serials, they are all eligible, no matter when they began or where they were published. As you read on our web site, separate ISSN are required for the print and online (or digitized) versions of the journals so even if the print version has an ISSN, one is needed for the digitized version.
Now for the challenging part: the U.S. ISSN Center normally only assigns ISSN to titles published in the U.S. It sounds like many of your titles have places of publication elsewhere in the world? Normally, we’d ask that you apply for ISSN to the ISSN center in the country of publication. Recently a more flexible policy was made for “digital reproductions,” indicating that ISSN can be assigned by the ISSN center in the country doing the digitizing. The U.S. ISSN Center has not yet had occasion to put this new policy to the test and we do have some questions in general and I’m sure about your project in particular since it seems a cooperative one.
As an aside, not all existing ISSN are in OCLC WorldCat by any means so some of the journals for which ISSN are needed may already have ISSN that could be found in the ISSN Portal, a subscription product sold by the ISSN International Centre in Paris. As you noted, JSTOR is what I might call a model user of ISSN. They align all their title histories and ISSN with the CONSER and ISSN Portal databases. If non-U.S. serials lack ISSN, they search in the Portal and if no ISSN is found, they apply to the relevant ISSN center for ISSN to be assigned. Since theirs is an ongoing publication model, we have not regarded it under the new digitization policy, which right now has been more applied to projects but as I noted, a lot of questions occur with regard to this policy.
Sorry for this somewhat roundabout answer to your question. Bottom line: I would be happy to work with you and the Biodiversity Heritage Library to determine the best way to obtain ISSN and to have the U.S. ISSN Center assign those that are determined to be under our purview. A very large-scale project could take a long time to accomplish since we have a limited staff and some other projects underway but we definitely want you to have the ISSN you need and will work towards that goal. One possible first step if your project has some funds for it, would be to take advantage of the ISSN International Centre’s “premium service” which could match your titles against the complete ISSN Register (the basis for the Portal product) and find any ISSN that you are not aware of.
If you’d like to discuss further details by phone, let me know and we can chat more about the steps you might take. I’d be curious as to an estimate of how many journals in total you anticipate in the project and what percentage might lack ISSN.
Let’s keep the discussion going!
Best,
Regina
Regina Romano Reynolds
Director, U.S. ISSN Center
Head, ISSN Section
Library of Congress
Washington, DC
(202) 707-6379 (voice)
(202) 707-6333 (fax)
rrey@loc.gov
From: Matthew Person [
mailto:mperson@mbl.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2016 1:15 PM
To: Reynolds, Regina
Subject: ISSN question from Matt Person - Biodiversity Heritage Library
Dear Regina,
Greetings from Cape Cod! ; we spoke very briefly at ALA, right after the Holdings Information Forum, you may recall me as the fellow who walked up to Steve and you to let you know how much I enjoyed your presentations...and had enjoyed the first time I heard you speak at NASIG in Portland a long time ago!
I have a question for you on behalf of colleagues and myself working on the
Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), this year celebrating our 10th anniversary...about 50,000,000 scanned pages...173,000 volumes. We are a multi-institutional cooperative and collaborative consortium of natural history libraries which joined together in 2006 to digitize our legacy biodiversity literature collections ...and as the project has been a solid international project, we have grown from our original 11 US and UK libraries to a project with active nodes in Brazil, Egypt, Africa, Australia, China, Mexico, Singapore...and the project continues to grow.
I am writing you with a question on behalf a working group within BHL I am a part of, the purpose of which is to improve the discover-ability of the books, journals and articles in our collection, in discovery systems and other databases. We've been mapping our BHL metadata to different discovery systems,databases, and standards, like OCLC, using KBART, JATS, among other standards.
The question arose today during a teleconference, the realization that since the majority of the serials in our collection are pre-1923 some of the bib records (the bib records ingested from the institutions which scanned a title) do not have ISSN's ...we were working today specifically on OCLC ISSN data requirements for ingesting records...and the question came up:
what do we do about legacy titles in BHL without ISSNs?
We took a look at JSTOR, and noticed that it seems all titles have ISSNs. We looked at Hathi Trust, and noticed a serials title record without an ISSNs... leading us to look at the OCLC record for that title ...also without an ISSN.
If we have serials titles in our BHL library without ISSNs, and we check OCLC to discover that the title has never been given an ISSN, would we (as a library which has scanned and "published" "legacy e-serials" title runs) follow through on these rules to request an ISSN for an ISSN lacking legacy title? : http://www.loc.gov/issn/basics/basics-brochure-serials.html#how
Any comments or thoughts you may have on this would be greatly appreciated, and as well thanks for your time in reading this.
Sincerely yours,
Matt
--
Matthew Person
Technical Services Coordinator
MBLWHOI Library
Woods Hole, MA 02543
ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6478-9061
>)))'>
--
Matthew Person
Technical Services Coordinator
MBLWHOI Library
Woods Hole, MA 02543
ORCID ID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6478-9061
>)))'>
