You Can Now Add and Edit ISSNs

We’ve just added a feature allowing you to add and edit ISSNs in your catalog records!

ISSNs (International Standard Serial Number) are numbers used for serial publications such as magazines, journals and newspapers. While many of our members catalog such items, previously there was no field for the ISSN. Now there is!



This information will populate with your copy, if present in the record you are adding (see image below). You can also add it manually, by editing the record details. We've gone back and backfilled ISSNs from old MARC records for around 43k books and other items.

>1 AbigailAdams26: Thank you, great news.

LOL -- "About ... time"

Indeed great news, I have a few serial sets I need to enter / validate and now there's no excuse.

Cool! When will it be added to the display styles?

>4 Aquila: When will it be added to the display styles?

When I can figure out how to do that! Lol. Probably in a couple days.

>5 knerd.knitter: Thank you!

Will it be considered for auto-combining, similar to ISBN? As it is, these things practically always require manual combination.

>7 SandraArdnas: Will it be considered for auto-combining

No, at this point it's not used in the auto-combining logic.

>8 knerd.knitter: Thanks. After some thought, ISSN is actually probably not very helpful for that as it's tied to periodical as a whole, so instead of more manual combining, we'd have more separating single issue records instead. What would be helpful is having it visible in edition groupings, not hidden like ASIN

Yeah, serial titles already autocombine too much, ISSN is not going to help that. Visibility would help.

>1 AbigailAdams26: Cool! I'd put the ISSN into the "Other Call Number" field on at least 1 occasion, so I've just confirmed it (via the LoC record I used to manually enter the work) and then added it to the named ISSN box.

I wish you minimal headaches in figuring out the "how to display" issue :)

>4 Aquila: Same question, but with the export formats. I.e. will this be added to the TSV export file format?

>12 bnielsen: will this be added to the TSV export file format? Yes.

>4 Aquila: >5 knerd.knitter:

Added ISSN to catalog, under the Bibliographic section of the configurable fields.

>13 knerd.knitter: Nice. I have some yearbooks that are a series and thus should have the same ISSN so it is nice to be able to police that via a script, that looks at the export file. Thanks!

>12 bnielsen: >13 knerd.knitter:

Added ISSN to excel, tsv, and json format exports. @ccatalfo is going to see about adding it to the MARC export.

I can't help feeling that ISSN ought to be included in series information. It seems redundant to include it at work level, but then I catalogue individual periodical issues.

>17 knerd.knitter: Nice. I've just tested it and it looks fine! Thanks!

Will this lead to us being able to edit things like the ASIN or LCCN on the edit book page soon?

>20 gilroy: Will this lead to us being able to edit things like the ASIN or LCCN on the edit book page soon?

I don't know; that's not up to me. @timspalding would have to speak to that.

>17 knerd.knitter: ISSNs do not seem to show up in Tinycat, even when the "Identifiers" section is chosen in Settings for display in "Detail Page sections".

>22 ocrhdlg: I think this is going to get solved within a few days (see >5 knerd.knitter:)

>23 LeslieWx: That post was referring only to the catalog. I'll have to see about getting them added to TinyCat.

>22 ocrhdlg: >23 LeslieWx: >24 knerd.knitter:

ISSNs added to TinyCat.

>25 knerd.knitter: Thank you.

Many people on LT catalogue individual issues of a serial (which will all share the same ISSN). Is the intention that the new ISSN field can be used in issue-level records, or only in the type of record that represents a serial as a whole?

>27 Edward: Since this field is visible on a book level, I'm sure that the new ISSN field can be used in issue-level records.

Thanks for adding ISSN to the export file (TSV). This of course made me wish that I could search for it in the catalogue.
But searching for 09017283 or 0901-7283 in my library turned up nothing.

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/bnielsen?&collection=-1&deepsearch=...

On the main website, the hyphen disappears when ISSN is saved. Too bad.