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AIB. Commissione nazionale università e ricerca |
Funded under the EU Fourth Framework ('Telematics for Libraries') CASA began in January 1997 as a three-year project with the aim of promoting co-operative action on serials and articles through the full and effectiveuse of ISSN-based identifiers.
The objectives and intended project outcomes from CASA are of direct relevence to the development of digital libraries. A principal objective has been to understand the underlying structure transactions in the emerging information economy, especially that for serial articles. Another objective has been to investigate how best to support automated transactions through (serial and article) identification, both existing (eg ISSN) and emergent (eg SICI and DOI). For the end user, the article is the intellectual work, or information object, that matters: serials are important only because they contain articles. Users wish to move from discovering what articles are of interest, on to find out the location of the serials containing these articles, and the terms of availability of the work sought. This is an area of study with many cross-currents. In this study, libraries are viewed as only one class of provider of services on serials, alongside publishers, indexers, secondary vendors and other providers of document delivery services.
The CASA partners have been investigating how the design and operation of union catalogues could benefit from use of the ISSN Register and how they might inter-operate in providing users with information of the location of serial holdings in libraries throughout Europe. At present, not every serial of interest has yet been assigned an ISSN, and new and important serials are being published each year. Additionally, could the system of uniform resource names and locators (URNs and URLs) being implemented for use in the WWW be linked to the ISSN Register in such a way as to provider users with locational information on the variety of (holding) catalogues and union lists maintained across Europe, and beyond?
A specific outcome of the CASA project will be a suite of CASA servers that fulfil three key user functions: support for requests to assign an ISSN to a serial; assistance to managers of serials lists so that they might economically add the ISSN to existing serial records; assistance for transactions relating to serials through identification based on the ISSN. The strategic use of identifiers is therefore at the heart of the project and the ISSN International Register represents the central information resource for CASA.
The ISSN International Centre is a partner in CASA which is led by the University of Bologna (CIB) and involves several parties to that information economy: a publisher, a national deposit library, three national ISSN Centres (ISSN-IT; ISSN-NO; ISSN-GR), university libraries (Florence, Ferrara, Torino and Bologna), a software house and several organisations supporting union catalogues (SBN, national library system for monographs & serials; ACNP, Italian union catalogue for serials; NOSP, the Nordic (supra-national) union catalogue, and EDINA, the SALSER virtual union catalogue for serials in Scotland).
Further information about the CASA project, including project work documents is made available on the CASA Web page, http://www.casa.issn.org and through the CASA e-mail discussion list, which you may join by sending an email message to usercasa@casa.cib.unibo.it containing the word SUBSCRIBE.