Administration of the ISBN System
Posted on Friday, May 11, 2007 - last modified on Friday, December 28, 2007.
The administration of the ISBN system is taken care of at three levels:
- the international agency
- group agencies
- publishers
The International Agency
The international agency is the global authority for the ISBN system, and is located in London. The executive director is Brian Green.
Contact Details:
International ISBN Agency
c/o EDItEUR
39-41 North Road
London N7 9DP
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 207 607 0021
Fax: +44 (0) 207 607 0415
e-mail: brian@isbn-international.org
URL: http://isbn-international.org
The functions of the international agency are:
- the promotion, coordination and supervision of the ISBN system worldwide
- the approval of the definition and structure of group agencies
- the allocation of group identifiers to group agencies
- to advise group agencies on their establishment and functioning
- to advise group agencies on the allocation of international publisher identifiers
- to publish the assigned group identifiers and publishers prefixes
The Group Agencies
The international agency oversees the group agencies. Group agencies administer the interests of the ISBN system in a national, regional, linguistic or other division.
See the groups page for a list of groups, their ids and names and their assigned publisher number ranges.
The group agencies are responsible for allocating publisher identifiers to participating publishers, and to supply them with the range of title identifiers allocated to them. Group agencies are responsible for maintaining registers of ISBN and collating statistics and reports on ISBN usage within their jurisdictions. The training, education and promotion is the responsibility of group agencies.
Publishers
Publishers are responsible for assigning ISBN to their own individual publications in accordance with the proper regulations and from the lists of individual ISBN supplied by their group agency.
The group agency makes such individual ISBN to publishers in accordance with anticipated usage by the publisher. As the volume of available ISBN is not infinite, the length of the publisher id and blocks of ISBN supplied to individual publishers is made on the basis of a publishers historical publication activity as well as anticipated future use.