What are ISBN, CIP, and Legal Deposit and Do You Require Them for Your Book?

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) offers ISBN, CIP, and Legal Deposit services as ways to preserve Canada’s published and recorded history. Should you take advantage of these for your book? Yes.

ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number and is an internationally recognized identification number, akin to a “fingerprint” for your book. It is NOT involved in copyright registration or protection, but it does provide a fool proof ID that can be entered by anyone searching for information about your book and, as a scanned barcode, instantly identifies your book and its publisher, etc. Most books list the ISBN in a barcode on the back cover of the book. I liken it to the Latin name for a plant, in that, unlike searching for a title or an author, searching by ISBN - like the Latin plant name -  identifies that book and that book only. (Try it now by typing in the ISBN of a book from your bookshelf into your web browser.) You can attain an ISBN by visiting http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/ciss-ssci/index-e.html

CIP stands for Canadian in Publication and provides a preliminary description of your book before it is published. The CIP gives librarians a headstart on cataloguing your book and provides dissemination of information about the book before it is published (meaning that the book information will show up on various searches about your subject matter because of the metadata the LAC makes available for your book) and the incorporation of the cataloguing data in the book when it is published. The CIP is placed on the copyright page of the book.

Below is a typical CIP provided by Library and Archives Canada for a recent textbook.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Masliyah, Jacob H. (Jacob Heskel), 1942-

            Handbook on theory and practice of bitumen recovery

from Athabasca Oil Sands / Jacob H. Masliyah, Jan A.

Czarnecki, and Zhenghe Xu.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Contents:  v. 1. Theoretical basis -- v. 2. Industrial practice.

ISBN 978-1-926832-03-6 (v. 1)

            1. Oil sands industry--Technological innovations--Alberta.

2. Secondary recovery of oil--Alberta. 3. Bitumen--Alberta.

I. Xu, Z. (Zhenghe)  II. Czarnecki, Jan A. (Jan Adam)  III. Title.

TN871.37.M38 2011           622'.33820971232          C2011-900185-3

Visit http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/cip/index-e.html for more information. You will require and ISBN in order to apply for CIP.

Legal Deposit is Library and Archives Canada’s principal means of assembling our nation’s collection comprehensively. Once published, you are required to send two copies of your book to Legal Deposit within one week of its publication. (Single copy if print run is less than 100.) For more information, visit http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/legal-deposit/index-e.html

The information provided here (which has been copied or paraphrased from the LAC website) is introductory only, as many of my clients have asked for a simple explanation of the above services. For full information on all of these services, please visit the appropriate LAC links or speak to one of their helpful librarians. Feel free to post a comment to expand this basic overview.