ISSN Ireland
Member since 1978
The Irish ISSN centre has been operational in the National Library of Ireland since 1978. It has always been part of the Periodicals department. Various staff have worked in the centre over the years with Inez Fletcher doing the longest stint, operating the centre between 1980 to 2015. Currently two staff work in the centre, Linda Fennessy and Siobhán O’Donovan.
Early ISSN assignments were handwritten on worksheets and posted to the International Centre. The IC sent copies of the register to all centres on microfiche. Later, it was distributed on CD.
Periodical barcoding began in Ireland in the 1980s and this led to an increase in ISSN requests.
In 1989 OSIRIS was being developed to allow national centres to create records electronically. The Irish ISSN centre participated in this project working closely with the IC. In the 1990s OSIRIS was up and running and records were exported to 3 ½ inch diskettes at intervals and then posted to the IC for uploading to the main database.
The next major step in the development of the Irish Centre was the introduction of Virtua Client and once again the Irish Centre was an early adaptor. The latest development was the introduction of ISSN+ in 2022. This has been a very welcome improvement and has really simplified the creation of online records.
