Successful Conclusion of the COBISS 2004 Conference

The COBISS 2004 Conference took place from 9 to 11 November at the Habakuk Convention Centre in Maribor. It was the thirteenth annual COBISS conference and the first one held since Slovenia's accession to the EU. In these new circumstances, the organiser IZUM undertook the mission to develop the already existing links to a permanent contact point for professional circles dealing with automation and the computer linking of libraries. The Conference brought together speakers and participants from nine countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe (Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Croatia, Italy, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, and Slovenia) and demonstrated that this area is well justified in being called the Region of Opportunities.

The COBISS 2004 Conference featured two major events:

• the publication of the Slovenian translation of AACR2 and the beginning of a broad discussion on the relationship between national and international cataloguing rules; the most outstanding presentation was that delivered by Barbara Tillett;
• the start of the automated exchange of bibliographic records between national library systems in the COBISS.Net network.

Numerous renowned speakers and very attentive conference participants, together with the organisers and the International Programme Committee, chaired by Sigrid Reinitzer, marked, in the best possible way, the twenty years that IZUM has taken care of library information systems development and maintenance. On this occasion, a letter of congratulations was received from Janez Drnovšek, President of the Republic of Slovenia.