SISAC barcode, which stands for Serials Industry Systems Advisory Committee, is a system used to encode SICI (Serial Item and Contribution Identifier) identifiers. SICI is a code used to uniquely identify serial items (magazine/period issue) and/or individual articles. SICI is primarily used by managers of serial titles and/or their contributions.

NOTE: This document will explain how to encode SICI codes as SISAC barcodes. How and what the SICI code itself represents is outside the scope of this document.

For more information on how a SICI code is formed, please refer to http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SICI/version2.html which provides a very complete overveiw of the subject.

Note that SISAC barcode is actually encoded using Code 128. That means that SISAC isn't really a symbology, but like UCC/EAN-128 is a format for expressing data within an existing symbology. Once the data has been converted from SICI to SISAC, Code 128 is used to actually encode the barcode.

As mentioned above, a SISAC symbol is, in fact, a Code 128 barcode. However, the SISAC symbol has the following structure within the Code 128 barcode:

1. An 8-digit ISSN number (with a hyphen separating the first and last four characters of the ISSN number).
2. A 3-digit date format code which indicates the format of the data that follows.
3. A variable number of characters that indicate the date of the serial item. The format of these characters and the length of this field depend on the date format code from #2 above.
4. A 4-digit enumeration data format code.
5. A variable number of characters that contain the optional enumeration data specified in #4 above.

Note that, in addition, there must be leading and trailing "white space" in accordance with the Code 128 standard.