[anoukaimee]

I have a lot of periodicals (about 400, largely popular magazines) that I have downloaded as "packs": say, Family Handyman, 2016-2018. Typically, these items don't have issue number or month/date of publication appended in the metadata.

I was surprised to learn that ISSNs are not unique identifiers of issues, but rather just of a given series--they don't correspond to an issue, with date/volume number, but rather just the title as a whole. What makes them even less useful for my purposes is that it appears that they can change for a given title if, say, it is bought out by a new publisher. This makes it difficult to use them effectively to organize content, much less download covers, etc.

Is there some unique identifier of popular periodicals that indexes the individual issue rather than the series? Any way to download that? I know that scholarly articles are very well-indexed in this way, but short of looking to the homepage for a given magazine and hoping there is a publicly available index of titles (and there typically isn't), there is nothing short of going in to each of these issues in my PDF reader, putting it in a spreadsheet, and then manually updating the metadata. Right?

If it helps, to clarify my purpose: short of just my OCD desire for organization, I ultimately would like to add content to the metadata that is searchable, summarizing the contents of each issue. I have a lot of garden and DIY magazines that have projects/plans that could be useful, but can't readily identify which issue has what. What I have been doing up to now is looking at the cover and putting the "headlines" in the content of the "comments" field; I'm not sure if, beyond getting metadata, there might be a better way to organize these. If there are additional suggestions on this point, that'd be great.

Thanks for any help.