This 4-part post covers a lot of the bibliographic data that holds the knowledge part of the book trade together, with a section for each of these.

I've written about ISBNs elsewhere. If you're a member of the #neverISBN or the #oneISBNtoRuleThemAll tribes, then this post is not for you — the ISBN holds it all together. It's a prerequisite for all of this. And remember, the ISBN identifies a single format of your work.

Many of these standards are international, but some of the national library stuff is, well, national. I'm describing the situation in the US, but other countries have similar setups.

The intent of this post is to provide basic orientation for indie authors. To find out more about these standards and the groups that maintain them, break out your search engines and go to work.

Will you sell any more books if you enable these standards for your books? Probably not. But there are other reasons to create and maintain high-quality bibliographic data for your books, not least of which is future-proofing your work and making it just that bit more appetizing for library acquisition.

Ready or not, let's dive right in.

Index of topics

LCCN – Library of Congress Control Number

The Library of Congress (LoC) is the “library of record” for the United States. Check out the link — it's had a long and fascinating history. The LoC created its own cataloguing system, the Library of Congress Classification, which gives every document an individual identifying number, the LCCN.

LCCNs refer only to print editions. You get one from the Library of Congress by asking for one. It can be a confusing process, mostly because of the nomenclature of the various programs. (Here is a useful guide.) Basically, you sign up for a program (the Pre-Assigned Control Number program, or PCN) that allows you to request an LCCN, which is in the form of YYYYnnnnnn, where “YYYY” is the current year, and “nnnnnn” is a numerical sequence that starts over each year.

Once granted, the LCCN goes on the copyright page of your book like this:

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012040017

Incidentally, the LoC makes LCCN records for other things. For example, it maintains various “authority” lists such as subjects and names, and other systems can refer to them (such as Worldcat (OCLC) below).