One of the few European countries that so far had not been members of the International ISMN Agency just signed the contract. The agency is run by the National Library of Montenegro and will be operational soon.

Myanmar is the third country in South East Asia and the 58th country worldwide that hosts an ISMN agency. The agency is run by the same institution, PYI Zone, that runs the ISBN agency and will be operational soon.

Music publishers often use an ISBN for their publications which is not according to either the ISBN or the ISMN standard. Hartmut Walravens, Chairman of the International ISMN Agency, listed the reasons for having a separate ISMN standard. Please view the paper here.

At the IAML congress in Antwerp 2014 Hartmut Walravens and Carolin Unger from the International ISMN Agency gave a presentation on the history and success of the ISMN. The text gives a good overview of the benefits of the ISMN and how the number is being used. It was first published in Fontes Artis Musicae, Volume 62, Issue 1, page 26-36. You can see the English version here and the Spanish version here.

As of number 25 the ISMN Newsletter will no longer be printed but published as PDF on our website only. It can be viewed here.

Pia Shekter, Secretary General of IAML, the International Association of Music Libraries, visited the office of the International ISMN Agency on 17 April 2015. ISMN and IAML are closely connected since the impulse to have a separate numbering system for printed music was made possible and promoted thanks to IAML colleagues. 
The International ISMN Agency was very glad to welcome Pia. We enjoyed a very vivid meeting and intend to intensify our cooperation.

Thanks to the commitment and kind cooperation of several national ISMN agencies, the International ISMN Agency can now provide translations of the ISMN Users' Manual on its website.
Besides the English original the manual can so far be viewed in Albanian, Armenian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian and Spanish. More languages will follow.
View the translations here.

The 57th country to join the ISMN system is Malta. The ISMN agency is hosted by the National Book Council in the Central Public Library. The agency will be operational soon.

The International ISMN Agency is glad to announce that it has joined the Linked Content Coalition (LCC). LCC is a not-for profit global consortium of TC 46 standards bodies and other stake-holders. The group aims to improve legal access to online content. In its Ten Targets for a Digital Future it describes the way to ensure the identification of creators and creations on the Internet, the possibility of having machine-readable rights information linked to the creations and to make the existing media standards more interoperable.

The Linked Content Coalition (LCC), the unique media project that recently published its innovative technical framework to improve the management and communication of and access to online rights information, has been re-constituted as a permanent organization. The new LCC is a not-for-profit global consortium of standards bodies and registries with a remit to facilitate and expand the legitimate use of content in the digital network. Its Ten Targets for a Digital Future aim to ensure that every creator and every creation can be automatically identified on the net if they wish to be; that every creation can have machine-readable rights information linked to it (whether for commercial or free use); and that existing standards of different media types can be interoperable. View the complete press release here.