Dear colleagues,

Please find attached a status report (a rather long one, I'm afraid) on 
development of International Standard Collection Identifier. Comments 
are welcome.

As said in the report, following the ISO TC 46 meeting in Washington 
last November Helsinki University Library has a mandate of making a New 
Work Item proposal of ISCI to ISO. Let me know if you are interested in 
participating in the writing of the proposal during the next few weeks.

Best regards,

Juha Hakala

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  Development of International Standard Collection Identifier

Juha Hakala

Helsinki University Library – The National Library of Finland 2005-01-25

ISO TC46 Meeting in Washington, DC November 2004 made a decision to ask 
the Finnish Standards Association (SFS) to prepare a new work item for 
International Standard Collection Identifier, ISCI. The decision was 
based on a discussion paper written in Helsinki University Library – The 
National Library of Finland, available at 
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/iso/tc46sc9/docs/sc9n394.pdf.

Since the national library is chairing the Finnish committee responsible 
of ISO TC46 standards, SFS has delegated the task of writing the NWI 
proposal to the library. Our aim is to complete the proposal before the 
end of February 2005.


    Background

There is an “identifier gap” between ISIL, International Standard 
Identifier for Libraries and Related Organizations, and traditional 
bibliographic identifiers such as ISSN (serials) and ISBN (books). As 
long as collection descriptions were seldom done, at least in machine 
readable form, this was not too much of a problem. But metasearch 
applications require collection level metadata, and especially when this 
data is shared in national or international scale, we need to identify 
these collections and/or metadata records describing them. A unique 
identifier will enable e.g. efficient searching of collections, and 
reliable duplicate control.

Although the need for standard collection identifier is clear, it is 
less obvious how to construct such identifiers. In the most abstract 
level, ISCI could be either “dumb”, that is, an ISSN-like string of 
characters which gives no hint as regards which organization has 
assigned it, or “intelligent”. In the latter case, ISCI would 
incorporate a string of characters indicating the organization which has 
assigned the code.


    ISCI: architectural principles

The ISCI NWI proposal will be based on the following two principles:

   1. ISCI should be an “intelligent” identifier

The reason for this choice is the very large number of organizations – 
libraries, archives, museums etc. which may at some point assign 
identifiers for their collections. A dumb code would require a strong 
international centre controlling and assisting the work in national 
level, and a network of national centers, each assigning blocks of ISCIs 
to organizations willing to assign them. Establishing this 
infrastructure would be costly, and usage of ISCI would not spread 
quickly into developing countries. For instance, ISSN network covers 
approximately 80 countries, and some of them have been unable to pay 
their annual fees. Funding the activities of a large ISCI international 
centre could become a problem.

If ISCI is constructed in such a way that identifier assignment can be 
delegated to national level and beyond to individual organizations, the 
task of coordinating the system in international and national level 
becomes much more manageable. There is no longer a need to assign ISCI 
blocks centrally, and maintain a central database of them. The role of 
the international centre would be primarily that of informing potential 
users about the system.

   2. Extending ISCI into URN must be simple

Uniform Resource Name (URN) serves dual function of identification and 
resolution. In simple terms, the latter means that it should be possible 
to type URN into the Location window of a browser; in return a user gets 
either the resource itself, or information about it, or just its present 
location (URL) in the Web. In principle any identifier can be converted 
into URN, which consists of string URN:, Namespace Identifier (e.g. 
ISBN:) and Namespace Specific String, which is the actual identifier. 
For instance, ISSN 1458-4387 can be expressed as URN:ISSN:1458-4387, and 
this URN could be resolved in the ISSN database into bibliographic data 
about the serial, including its Web address (which is 
http://www.helsinki.fi/atk/lehdet).

Any URN can be resolved, but the task is easier if the URN can assist in 
locating the appropriate resolution service. For instance, resolving 
ISSN-based URNs would not be possible without the ISSN database in 
Paris, containing approximately million serial records, for each 
periodical which has an ISSN. On the other hand, ISBNs indicate language 
and/or country, and the difficulty of resolving ISBN-based URNs varies 
from simple (951-ISBNs can all be resolved in the Finnish national 
bibliography) to rather complicated (German language area, ISBN:s 
beginning with 3, may be resolved either in German, Austrian or Swiss 
national bibliography).


    ISCI: central features

We shall propose International Standard Collection Identifier consisting 
of three parts:

    * Identifier for the organization
    * A character separating organization and collection identifiers
      (most likely “_”)
    * Internal identifier for a collection owned by the organization

The identifier for organizations will be ISIL, International Standard 
Identifier for Libraries and Related Organizations (see 
http://www.bs.dk/isil). This choice has some obvious benefits.

    * Each organization having an ISIL identifier (for instance,
      Helsinki University Library’s ISIL is FI-H) can assign ISCI’s with
      no support from ISCI international or national agency.
    * The resulting system is extensible to beyond the library domain,
      to basically all organizations which have collections that can be
      described.
    * Given the structure of ISIL, each ISCI-based URN will contain a
      hint as regards how to resolve it, and this hint will also be
      understandable for humans, including layman who will be able to
      understand at least the country where the collection is physically
      located.

There are arguments against using ISIL and part of collection 
identifier. ISIL-based ISCI does not provide any information about where 
the items in the collection originate from (unless this information is 
provided in the internal collection identifier). For instance, the 
Slavic collection of Helsinki University Library, built when the library 
had legal deposit right in the Russian empire in 19^th century, will 
look “Finnish”. But the problem with our Slavic collection and many 
other collections is that they may never have been “national”, or if 
they have been, they no longer are. Our Slavic collection originates 
from what was Russia in 19^th century. Geographical coverage of present 
Russia is quite different; it does no longer include, among other 
things, Poland, Baltic countries, and Finland.

It may also be claimed that acquiring an ISIL may not be possible for 
all organizations interested in describing their collections. But Danish 
National Library Authority, which hosts the International ISIL centre, 
has made it clear that they will not prevent any organization from 
getting an ISIL code as long as they have a valid need for it.

Separating character should be one which requires no conversion when 
ISCIs are expanded into URNs. The choice of such characters which are 
not allowed in ISIL is limited; from this set, “_” is probably the best 
choice.

Many organizations have assigned internal names or identifiers for their 
collections. These are often well established and mnemonic. For 
instance, Helsinki University Library’s Slavic collection is Slavica, 
and national (legal deposit) collection Fennica. Using these names as 
part of the identifier will simplify the identifier assignment process. 
ISCI rules and guidelines will be set up in such a way that these names 
(converted to roman characters, if need be) can be used as part of the 
identifier.

Following these guidelines, Helsinki University Library’s Slavica 
collection would get the following ISCI:

FI-H_Slavica

which could be expressed as the following URN:

URN:ISCI:FI-H_Slavica

provided that the Namespace Identifier for ISCI will be “ISCI”. 
Namespace registration for ISCI can not start before the ISCI 
standardization process in ISO has reached at least Draft International 
Standard level.


    Future steps

Once the New Work Item proposal has been left and – hopefully - 
accepted, the real standardization work will begin. A new working group 
under ISO TC46 Sub-committee 9 (Identification and Description) will be 
formed. It will spend X months in herding the proposal through the 
various steps (Committee draft, Draft International Standard and finally 
Final Draft International Standard, if necessary). Although some of 
these steps can be passed if the proposal is deemed acceptable, the 
process may still require a lot of time. It is realistic to assume that 
once the working group is formed the work will take about two years.

-- 

****************************************************
 Juha Hakala
 Director, Information Technology
 Helsinki University Library 
 tel +358 9 191 44293 fax +358 9 753 9514
 internet: [log in to unmask]
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