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The paper aims to report on the 30th IATUL Annual Conference held in Leuven, Belgium, 1‐4 June, 2009

The paper summarises the major themes of the conference as well as giving some specific details of developments at the Indira Gandhi National Open University in India, which supplement the author's presentation at the conference.

The IATUL conference included a wide gamut of important issues faced by the libraries in the knowledge society of the twenty‐first century. The delegates exchanged ideas and learnt of best practices prevalent in libraries across the globe. The conference provided insights into the issues of innovation, change, benchmarking, quality assurance, Web 2.0 tools, information literacy, free internet resources and so forth.

It was a conference of immense value for library and information professionals. It raised important issues; problems faced by the libraries today and offered tentative solutions.

Information is now coming centre stage in companies anxious to maintain their competitive advantage in the dot.com economy as electronic business‐to‐business exchanges rapidly emerge. The technical issues of being able to search across a wide range of different database and document types are now being solved through enterprise information portal applications (EIP), often referred to as corporate portals. These provide users with access to internal and external information resources through a customisable Web browser interface. This paper outlines the generic features of EIP applications, and categorises the different approaches being taken by EIP vendors, many of whom are adapting software developed for document management and information retrieval purposes. Emerging roles for information professionals in the deployment of EIP applications are discussed.

Building a Web‐based e‐library may be the most important thing a library ever does. An important role for librarians in all types of libraries is the planning and/or building of Web‐based e‐libraries. Offers a practical discussion of developing and implementing a collection plan for building Web‐based e‐libraries. The starting point for developing any collection plan is an assessment of the function of and need for an information collection and the audience it will serve. Discusses some guidelines and practical strategies on where and how to find, identify, evaluate and select appropriate Web‐based information resources. Focuses on Web‐based information resources rather than other electronic information resources such as CD‐ROM or fee‐based databases that have been discussed extensively in recent literature.