ISSN Iceland
Member since 2001
The Icelandic Centre for ISSN is a part of the National and University Library of Iceland. We joined the ISSN network formally in 2001. From its very beginnings the ISSN Centre has been managed and staffed by only one person, Helga Kristín Gunnarsdóttir, who also manages assignments of ISBNs and ISMNs.
The assignment of ISSN numbers for Icelandic periodicals began in the 1970s, and Icelandic publishers have had ISSN numbers printed on periodicals since around 1980. In 1984, the University Library, and later the National and University Library of Iceland, began acting as an intermediary for obtaining international serial numbers from the ISSN International Centre in Paris, which handled the registration of the publications on our behalf. This followed the cooperation we had with NOSP (the Nordic Union Catalogue of Serial Publications) which Iceland had participated in from the beginning. NOSP was in close cooperation with the International Centre in Paris, using ISSN for NOSP records.
At the end of the year 2000, an agreement was signed with the International Centre in Paris to establish a National Centre at the National and University Library of Iceland. With the increase of serial publications in Iceland it had become necessary for us to take over the responsibility for the ISSN records. Operations began in 2001, and to date over 4200 titles have been assigned ISSNs. In the beginning we used the OSIRIS application to catalogue the ISSN records and exported them to the ISSN register. When the IC implemented the Virtua system in 2004 we started using the Virtua Client to catalogue directly and then switched to ISSN+ in 2022.
Helga Kristín attended the directors’ meetings which were held in Vilnius, Madrid and Stockholm. She has also visited the National Centres in Stockholm, Paris and the Hague. We were delighted to receive Dóra Kőszegi head of ISSN Hungary who visited our National Centre last year.
