Content area
According to the current (2022) edition of ISO 3297, the standard that governs the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), a cluster ISSN is "an ISSN assigned to group continuing resources related to each other." Unless the system creating the link and the library catalog receiving the link use the same ISSNs, the links will fail and the end user will experience a dead-end link. ...The goal of the revision to the ISSN standard was to create a "Work-level" (title-level) identifier; one that would supplement the current ISSNs (which are still needed to uniquely define the medium version in support of the supply chain) and allow the overall publication to be identified to support its access.6 To deal with any case where one medium version undergoes a major title change (and is assigned a new ISSN), but the other versions do not, the group does not receive a new ISSN-L until the titles of all the medium versions have changed." A clear conflict between the acquisition supply chain and the goal of linking medium versions in an online environment Solving a problem like this is possible only if all parties to a transaction implement the solution, something that was obvious to Pesch back in 2009: "All parties that may be involved in linking or disseminating information need to accept and distribute the ISSN-L as appropriate for the system to be effective.8 As an added nudge, he noted that "to help bootstrap the various access and linking systems, ISSN mapping files have been provided [by the ISSN International Centre]... free of charge." Fast-forward now to 2017, when TC46/SC9 (Identification and Description), the International Standards Organization group responsible for the maintenance of ISO 3297, undertook one of its periodic reviews of the standard.