The Department of Library Services Special Collections Unit – Issuing ISBNs and developing our TUK Collection

The TUK—or UP Publications—Collection forms part of the DLS Special Collections and is comprised of the published research output of the University of Pretoria. The Special Collections Unit at Merensky 2 Library is mandated to keep preservation copies of all University publications, according to a Senate decision of 1979. This includes any work authored, co-authored or edited by UP member of staff, any work with a chapter authored by a member of staff, or any work published by a University department or organisation. As such, at least one copy of these publications should in principle be donated to the TUK Collection, however Special Collections also identifies gaps in the collection and makes purchases accordingly.

The Special Collections Unit also issues International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) for UP publications, and this function works in tandem with the development of the TUK Collection, as Special Collections is a ‘place of legal deposit’ for UP publications. We cannot assign ISBN’s to works emanating from other publishers because the first nine digits in the ISBN are a designation of the name of the issuing body, in this case, the University of Pretoria. For all non-UP publications, the National Library of South African will need to be contacted.

For ease of reference we have developed a workflow describing the process for the issuing of ISBNs, which can be downloaded from our webpage here https://library.up.ac.za/special/isbn. For any ISBN related queries, please contact Ms Sonto Mabena at [email protected]