International Standard Music Number (ISMN).

Unger, Carolin

Some news from the International ISMN Agency: The next Annual General Meeting will take place in September 2014 in Istanbul by kind invitation of the Turkish ISMN agency which belongs to the Ministry of Culture. For the first time we will have kind of a joint venture since the three major publication standards will convene consecutively in one week at one place: ISMN, ISBN and ISSN. Many of the delegates of one standard are also responsible for one or both other standards. So we expect some synergetic effects.

We currently have 56 members. One of the newest is the United States with the Library of Congress maintaining the agency. Susan Vita, Mary Wedgewood, and their colleagues of the Music Department organised last year's splendid ISMN Panel meeting. They showed us in how short a time they had established the agency and developed an impressive website which offers publishers an easy way to apply for numbers and at the same time to deliver metadata of the publications, which is of great use for the library work.

Other countries recently showed interest to join the ISMN system: For example Austria, a country that is so far covered by the German ISMN agency. From South America we have Costa Rica, Ecuador and Guatemala that consider a membership. And also China is a longstanding prospect. They already translated and published the ISO Standard, so we hope it won't take very long now.

As every five years, the ISMN Standard will come up for systematic review soon. If a ballot proves that the ISO member countries are in favour of a revision a working group will be formed towards this end. This would give us the possibility to update the standard a bit where necessary.

We plan to join the Linked Content Coalition (LCC), consisting of several stakeholders not only from international SC9 standards, like ISNI, ISTC, ISBN, ISRC, DOI but also other interested parties as EDItEUR, NISO, CISAC and more. LCC will try to improve the interoperability of these standards by linking them which is not an easy task. But the aim is to gain a better efficiency in the use of publication standards in general.

Carolin Unger

ISMN Coordinator