The COBISS Conference 2011, the eighteenth conference in a row, was held on 15 and 16 November at the Congress Centre of the Habakuk Hotel in Maribor. It has become a constant in professional meetings of librarians and IT professionals in the region. More than 350 participants came from eleven countries, the majority of them from those using COBISS as their own national system.

The main theme of the conference was free flow of bibliographic information, which is consistent with the overall objective of previously held conferences. The latter is to make people in this line aware of professional development both abroad and in Slovenia, as well as to reinforce cohesion within the international community of experts who develop and use COBISS. In the introductory part of the conference, presentations were given by the i nvited speakers; among them Jay Jordan, President of OCLC, Richard Wallis, expert from Talis, and Alan Danskin, Head of the RDA from the British Library. This was followed by a set of lectures given by the Slovenian experts: Dr Melita Ambrožič (National and University Library), Dr Maja Bogataj Jančič (Intellectual Property Institute) and Dr Svetlana Slapšak (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis). The post-conference day consisted of Section A on technological innovations in the COBISS system with twenty contributions and Section B on the role of COBISS Alumni with eight contributions.

Most conference contributions are published either in the form of a summary or in their integral form in the Proceedings of the COBISS 2011 Conference (in Volume XVI, number 2011/4 of IZUM’s professional journal Organizacija znanja).

Two accompanying events marked the conference: the signing of the Letter of Intent on the establishment of the OCLC–IZUM strategic partnership and the decision reached immediately preceding the conference by the General Assembly of UNESCO in Paris according to which IZUM had been granted the status of the 'Centre under the auspices of UNESCO'.

COBISS conferences have played an important role in the realisation of the mission and tasks of a public institution and have contributed to Slovenia’s leading role in the development of librarianship in the region, which is also part of the International Development Cooperation Programme of the Slovenian Government.

Davor Šoštarič
Director