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 A Company of Union of Scientists in Bulgaria 
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| THE ISSN You have certainly already noticed or used this perhaps mysterious code on serials which you read or consult or in references concerning articles or serials : the ISSN. The ISSN is the standardized international code which allows the identification of any serial publication independently of its country of publication, of its language or alphabet, of its frequency, medium, etc. The ISSN is a numeric code which is used as an identifier : it has no signification in itself and does not contain in itself any information referring to the origin or contents of the publication. The ISSN takes the form of the acronym ISSN followed by two groups of four digits, separated by a hyphen. The eighth character is a control digit calculated according to a modulo 11 algorithm on the basis of the 7 preceding digits; this eighth control character may be an "X" if the result of the computing is equal to "10", in order to avoid any ambiguity. The ISSN is linked to a standardized form of the title of the identified serial, known as the "key title", which repeats the title of the publication, qualifying it with additional elements in order to distinguish it from other publications having identical titles. Here are some examples :
If the title of the publication changes in any significant way, a new ISSN must be assigned in order to correspond to this new form of title and avoid any confusion. A serial publication whose title is modified several times in the course of its existence will be assigned each time a new ISSN, thus allowing precise indentification of each form of the title : in fact it is then considered that they are different publications even if there is a logical link between them. Contrary to other types of publications, the world of serial publications is particularly changeable and complex : the lifetime of a title may be extremely short; many publications may be part of a complex set of relationships, etc. These particularities themselves necessitated the introduction of the ISSN. There are different links which may exist between several serials, each one of which being identified by an ISSN. EXAMPLE OF A “FAMILY TREE” OF SERIAL PUBLICATIONS
Serial publications What is a serial publication? A precise definition, which allows agreement on the exact field of application of the ISSN can be found in the ISO 3297 standard (ISSN) : "A publication, in any medium, issued in successive parts, usually having numerical or chronological designations and intended to be continued with no predetermined end. NOTE : This definition excludes works intended to be published in a finite number of parts.(...) The ISSN is applicable to the entire population of serials, whether past, present or to be published in the foreseeable future. Serials include periodicals newspapers, annuals (reports, yearbooks, directories, etc.), the journals, series, memoirs, proceedings, transactions, etc. of societies." Hence an ISSN can be assigned to any serial publication, whether it is printed or available on any other medium (CD-ROM, floppy disk, electronic publication...). The fundamental criteria which define a serial publication are that its component parts are published successively under the same title for a period of time which is not limited in advance. The ISSN is defined by the ISO 3297 standard The ISSN is defined by a standard, i.e. it is the object of a definition and of standardized application rules internationally adopted in the framework of ISO (International Standards Organization) which groups the official standardization institutions throughout the world. This has allowed from the origin the ISSN to be a tool internationally used in the most diverse frameworks in a coherent and compatible way. The ISSN International Centre is the registration institution officially designated by ISO for the ISSN. The other identification codes The principle of an international standardized identification code exists in other domains. Thus monographs (books) are identified through the ISBN (International Standard Book Number), musical scores by the ISMN (International Standard Music Number), sound recordings by the ISRC (International Standard Recording Code), etc. To each of these codes corresponds a particular and well defined field of application and a logic which is proper to it. It should also be noted that as the ISSN can among others be applied to series of books; a book belonging to a particular series wiil have both an ISSN (identifying the series) and an ISBN (identifying the given monograph as such).
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