The International Standard Text Code (ISTC) is a
unique identifier
A unique identifier (UID) is an identifier that is guaranteed to be unique among all identifiers used for those objects and for a specific purpose. The concept was formalized early in the development of computer science and information systems. ...
for text-based works. The
ISO
ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization.
ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance
* Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007
* Iso ...
standard was developed by
TC 46/SC 9
ISO/TC 46 is Technical Committee 46 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), responsible for Information and documentation.
Overview
The scope of the committee is 'standardization of practices relating to libraries, documenta ...
and published in March 2009 as ISO 21047:2009. The authority responsible for implementing the standard was assigned t
The International ISTC Agency That Agency ceased operations in 2017. Following a public call for a new organization to support the maintenance and registration of ISTC data in which no other organizations stepped forward, and a subsequent report produced by ISO TC 46/SC 9 on text identification, the ISTC standard was withdrawn from the ISO catalogue of standards in August 2021.
NOTE: The following information has not been substantially edited but remains as an archive of the standard and its implementation.
Purpose
By including one or more ISTC numbers as an attribute of a bibliographic record (e.g., an
ISBN
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.
An ISBN is assigned to each separate edition and ...
record), the aggregation, collocation, filtering, etc. of publication records can be achieved automatically based on the content of the relevant publications. This solves the problem of identifying the relevant content when it is published under different titles, or where different content is published under the same title. The ISTC also enables many improvements in efficiency, such as enabling retail websites to accurately re-use reviews and subject classifications applied to one publication on every other publication of the same work.
Another application of ISTCs involves using them to identify distinct but related works. E.g., the bibliographic records for a number of derivations, such as translations of the same work, can include the ISTC for that original work and thus be automatically grouped together, even though the records are for publications of distinct works with their own individual titles.
Implementation
A single database was used to hold all ISTC records, regardless of which country they were registered in. Anybody wishing to register a textual work, e.g., an author, agent or publisher, must submit a request to an ISTC registration agency with the necessary metadata needed to distinguish that work from all others. This enables each request for the registration of a textual work to be checked for global uniqueness. If a work has not already been registered (i.e., if the metadata supplied on the registration request is found to be unique), then a new ISTC number is returned by the system; if a work has already been registered (i.e., if the metadata supplied on the registration request matches that of an existing ISTC record), then the existing ISTC number is returned. There is no concept of ownership of an ISTC number; the same number should be used by anyone wherever the same work appears and needs to be identified. There is no restriction concerning which registration agency each registration request must be submitted through. Anybody wishing to check whether or not a particular work has already been registered will be able to do so by accessing a free-to-use search facility available on the International ISTC Agency website. NOTE: The search functionality is no longer functioning on the ISTC website. Pleas
contact ISOfor information about accessing the historical data.
Format
ISTC numbers are
hexadecimal
In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal (also base-16 or simply hex) numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using 10 symbols, hexa ...
, so may be formed from numbers 0-9 and letters A-F. They are made up of four parts:
# registry agency element - denotes which agency the work was registered through;
# registration year element - denotes what year the work was registered in;
# work element - 8 digit hexadecimal number, unique within year/agency;
# check digit - calculated using a MOD 16-3 algorithm defined by
ISO 7064
ISO/IEC 7064 is a standard promulgated by the International Standards Organization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) that defines algorithms for calculating check digit characters. The checks should be applicable to alphanu ...
.
Example: ISTC A02-2009-000004BE-A
User manual
The ISTC User Manual is the official guide to the use of ISTCs; it is available for download free of charge from the International ISTC Agency's website.
External links
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{{Authority control
ISO standards
Unique identifiers
2009 introductions