ISSN Germany

ISSN in West Germany started as a project funded in 1974 by the Federal Ministry for Research and Technology to establish an ISSN Centre for the Federal Republic of Germany at the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt am Main.

Also in 1974 an ISSN Centre for the German Democratic Republic (DDR) was established at the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig.

Until 1990 each German state, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, had an autonomous working ISSN Centre. With the reunification of both German countries and the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt am Main and the Deutsche Bückerei in Leipzig it was decided that the reunited German ISSN Centre should be located at the site in Frankfurt am Main.

Up to 2016 the German ISSN Centre used an own cataloguing system for creating records for the ISSN Register. For a resource two records were created. One for the German National Bibliography and an additional record for the ISSN Register.

With the implementation of RDA in the German speaking countries a project was conducted to use the same record in the German Catalogue of Serials (ZDB) for ISSN and for national bibliographic purposes. Since the reorganization of ISSN workflows in 2016 assigning ISSNs for German publications again is performed by an ISSN team working on both locations of the German National Library (Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main).

Since 1974 more then 113.000 continuing resources published in Germany have received an ISSN. A collaborative job done by many ISSN colleagues working in the German National Centre over the past 50 years.

We would like to say thank you to all parties involved in our daily ISSN business (our colleagues from the German Union Catalogue of Serials, the ISSN network, publishers and customers) for a good and fruitfull collaboration. And we wish the ISSN network all the best for the coming 50 years. Hoping that future colleagues working in the network are looking back in 2075 saying our predecessors have done a good job.