All About ISTC

• Overview and Scope of the ISTC
• ISTC Benefits
• Structure and Syntax of the ISTC
• Allocating ISTCs
• ISTC Metadata
• Administrative Metadata

Overview and Scope of the ISTC

The International Standard Text Code (ISTC) system is a global identification system for textual works. It is primarily intended for use by publishers, bibliographic services, retailers, libraries and rights management agencies.

Each ISTC is a unique “number” assigned by a centralised registration system to a textual work, when a unique set of information about that work, known as a “metadata record”, is entered into the system. If another, identical metadata record has already been registered (perhaps, in the case of an out of copyright work, by another publisher), the system will assume the new ISTC request refers to the same work and will output the ISTC of the identical (or nearly identical) metadata record already held on the system.

An ISTC does not “belong” to a single author/publisher; rather, it “belongs” to the work it identifies. This means that the same ISTC number should be used to identify the same content even when it is being published by a different publisher and/or in a different publication format.

By including the ISTC of a textual work in the list of attributes of each actual product (e.g. each book) that it is published in, it is then possible to search for, and find, only that specific textual work among many products. This is the case even though some products with different content might have very similar or even identical names, and even though some products containing the desired content have entirely different names.

The ISTC is not intended for identifying manifestations of a textual work, including any physical products (e.g. a printed article) or electronic formats (e.g. an electronic book). Manifestations of textual works are the subject of separate identification systems.

The allocation of an ISTC to a work shall have no meaning or value as legal evidence regarding the copyright status of, or any intellectual property rights in, the work.

ISTC Benefits

For many reasons, most textual content is made available in more than one format or edition, and often by more than one publisher. While for many years the ISBN has made it easy to distinguish these different products, now the ISTC makes it possible to group these products containing the same content, or even in some cases, different content with the same origins, together. This makes it possible to:

Improve Discoverability of books and other written publications:

• Instead of needing to know all the different titles under which the same work has been published, the user need only find one edition, from which the ISTC number can be used to link all alternative editions of the work.
• Conversely, when a publication has a title shared with, or similar to that of completely different works, the results-list of a search can be reduced to include only the desired work. This can be more precise, and certainly quicker, then relying on refining a search using one or more contributor names, especially when the author has written several works with similar titles

Comply With Territorial Rights:

• Online retailers often accidentally list (and sell) publications intended for specific countries when they ought to be selling only a different, territory-specific edition. When an ISTC is included in the product record for each of the different editions, it is possible to automatically exclude those editions for which a territory-specific equivalent (with “sole market rights” is available.

Improve Collections Management and Sales & Loans Analysis:

• Librarians and library systems can easily & accurately collocate publications automatically, even when they have different titles, when an ISTC is included in the catalogue record.
• Sales analyses and analyses of loans can be efficiently run at the level of a work instead just of unique editions. This addresses the problem of putting a value to the total sales of multiple editions, or the total number of library loans where one or more libraries has different editions of a publication.

Structure and Syntax of the ISTC

Basic structure and syntax

An ISTC consists of 16 numbers and/or letters. These are “hexadecimal digits”, which may be any of the Arabic numerals 0 to 9 and the Latin letters A to F.

While no “meaning” should be inferred from the digits of an ISTC, they are constructed from the following parts, starting from the left:

• Registration element – This is used by the registration agency for administrative purposes and consists of 3 hexadecimal digits;
• Year element – This is 4 digits long and represents the year in which the ISTC was registered (it does not relate to the year in which the work was produced or first published);
• Work element – This consists of 8 hexadecimal digits. It is assigned automatically by the central ISTC registration system after a metadata record has been submitted for registration and the system has verified that the record is unique;
• Check digit – This is a single hexadecimal digit, automatically generated by the ISTC registration system. It is calculated in accordance with ISO/IEC 7064 using MOD 16-3.

When an ISTC is displayed it should be preceded by the letters “ISTC”, with a hyphen or space between each element, as shown in the following examples:

EXAMPLES:

ISTC 0A9 2002 12B4A105 7
ISTC 0A9-2002-12B4A105-7

Allocating ISTCs

An ISTC can only be allocated to a textual work by an authorised ISTC registration agency; this will usually follow a request from either the creator of the work or an authorized representative, e.g. a publisher of that work. The person or organization that asks for a work to be registered and provides the metadata for it is called the “registrant”. It is important that the information about a work should be provided by someone knowledgeable and responsible, ensuring that information is as accurate as possible. There may be some situations where a third party, e.g. a national library, wishes to register a number of textual works which are out of copyright; if there is no longer any living representative for the author, then a third party, (in this example, the library) would be allowed to act as the registrant for these works.

What is eligible for an ISTC (and when)?

ISTCs are designed to identify textual works, i.e. the outputs of creative and/or intellectual effort expressed wholly or predominantly in textual form that are intended for publication. Textual works which include illustrations, whether created specifically for the work or reused from elsewhere such that they are regarded as an integral part of the work, are eligible for ISTCs. Works that are entirely graphic, with no text, are not eligible for ISTCs. If you are not sure whether a work is eligible for an ISTC or not, please contact your local ISTC registration agency for advice.

An ISTC may be allocated to an eligible work as soon as sufficient information about the work can be provided; the work does not have to have already been published. In fact, it is preferable to allocate an ISTC before publishing the work, so that the “product record” (which, if it is for a book, would usually be identified with an ISBN) can include the ISTC as an attribute of the product record from the outset.

An ISTC can equally be assigned to a work after its publication, although care needs to be taken in case there are multiple editions (e.g. the same work in different formats and/or through different publishers).

ISTC Metadata

In order to register a textual work with an ISTC, it must be possible to uniquely describe the work so that it can be distinguished from any similar works already allocated their own ISTC. The ISTC registration system accepts “metadata” about each work using the “ONIX For ISTC Registration Messages” metadata schema. This is based on the book industry standard for communicating product information, ONIX for Books, but requires less data elements and has some data elements which are unique to ISTC. These include information about the origin of the work, i.e. is the work entirely original, or derived (perhaps as a translation or an annotated version) from another work? These data elements are necessary because ISTC metadata is used to make it possible to easily distinguish one work from another, even if two works have the same name and author (at least one author has written a stage play with the same name as a novel they wrote). Your local ISTC registration agency will help you devise the most suitable method for assembling and submitting the necessary work metadata in order to allocate each unique work with its own ISTC.

Administrative Metadata

ISTC registration agencies shall capture such administrative metadata as may be essential for the efficient management of the registration process.