Re: E-ISSN?

I think the ISSN registry does indeed treat these as the 'ISSN' - so the eISSN isn't a different kind of ISSN but just a different label for the ISSN applied to an electronic publication.

However there is a lot of common practice that treats the concept of the journal 'title' as being something apart from the actual instantiations and so groups the print and electronic versions together, thus needing to differentiate through the use of the 'e' prefix for one of the ISSNs. Two systems I'm involved in (KB+ and GOKb) do this I'm afraid to say, and it is common practice in other 'knowledgebases' (SFX, SS360 etc.) as well as being pretty much baked into the KBart guidelines (http://www.uksg.org/kbart/s5/guidelines/data_field_labels).

The ISSN-L is, as you say, an ISSN used to link things together but as far as I understand it the ISSN-L is simple one of the existing ISSNs for the title (not necessarily the ISSN for the print version, although it commonly is) and is not intended as a separate identifier but simply that one of the identifiers plays an additional role - although I'm not sure this isn't just messing about with the semantics to be honest, and in any case I don't think really helps us.

To address the questions:
The concept of the 'eISSN' is useful as long as people continue to represent the print and electronic versions as part of the same 'record' - and I don't see this changing at the moment
I'm not confident that we can ignore the ISSN-L - this is a relatively recent concept and my instinct is use will grow over the next few years - again it is something that has been discussed in both the GOKb and KB+ projects although no specific use yet I think there will be once we have the data available.

Owen


Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: owen@ostephens.com
Telephone: 0121 288 6936

On 22 Nov 2013, at 23:10, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@KCOYLE.NET> wrote:

> One of the examples I added includes the E-ISSN. I have mixed feelings about this, but I suspect it is quite common in metadata. (It seems to me that it should be an ISSN attached to an electronic publication, not a different kind of ISSN... oh well.) There is also the ISSN-L, which fortunately does not seem to be referred to much, so I hope we can ignore it.
> 
> If you haven't run into ISSN-L, it is the ISSN of the print copy, and is presumably used to gather the various formats (E, print, whatever) together. The "L" stands for "linking." From the ISSN agency page:
> 
> ISSN-L 0264-2875
>            Printed version: Dance research = ISSN 0264-2875
>            Online version: Dance research (Online) = ISSN 1750-0095
> 
> If you know of a growing use of these, please speak up. I haven't run into them, but I'm not watching any serials databases carefully. Also, if E-ISSNs are falling out of use, then we can skip those. Anyone?
> 
> kc
> -- 
> Karen Coyle
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
>