024 ISRC and ISMN

Last week we covered the basics of the 024 tag and UPCs in particular. This week we will look at a couple of standard identifiers related to music. 

The ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) is the international identification system for sound recordings and music video recordings. Each ISRC is a unique and permanent identifier for a specific recording, independent of the format on which it appears (CD, audio file, etc.) or the rights holders involved. Only one ISRC should be issued to a track, and an ISRC can never represent more than one unique recording. ISRCs are widely used in digital commerce by download sites and collecting societies. An ISRC can also be permanently encoded into a product as its digital fingerprint. Encoded ISRCs provide the means to automatically identify recordings for royalty payments. The Recording Industry Association of America has been appointed by the International ISRC Agency to oversee the ISRC system within the United States and its territories. 

The ISRC usually appears on an item preceded by the letters ISRC. If a bibliographic record includes ISRCs they will be in the 024 tag with a first indicator value of 0 (zero). The full 12-digit number will appear in subfield a with no punctuation or spaces. 

___________________________________________

According to the Library of Congress: 

"The International Standard Music Number (ISMN) is a unique identifier for notated music (scores, parts, vocal scores, choral octavos, miniature scores, pop folios, etc.) whether published in print, online, or in other media. Each edition or version of a musical work is assigned a separate ISMN. Each separately available constituent part of a publication is assigned its own ISMN. 

The ISMN is useful in music publishing, the music trade, and libraries. It is used for inventory, ordering, billing, rights assessment, information retrieval, library circulation, and inter-library loan. The ISMN serves as a unique identifier for a monographic publication, from manuscript stage through editorial and manufacturing processes until the work is finished.

The U.S. ISMN Agency at the Library of Congress assigns ISMN identifiers to publishers and individual ISMN to notated music items published in the United States."

You can find a publisher from an ISMN using the database maintained by the International ISMN Agency which is in Berlin, Germany.

The ISMN usually appears on an item preceded by the letters ISMN. If a bibliographic record includes ISMNs they will be in the 024 tag with a first indicator value of 2. The format of these numbers changed in 2008 and BF&S has details about the changes should you need them. 

___________________________________________

Since this is the last Tuesday of the month it is time for the February 2024 Tuesday Tags Review Quiz. 

This is a 5-question self-check that will give you a chance to see how much you have learned about MARC tags this month (or where you may want to go back and re-read).