August 1^st is the last day to offer a paper to the ICML contributed papers and poster programme. A link from the home page of the www.icml.org web site will take you straight to a formatted application form, making it really easy for you to submit your ideas. Abstracts must be submitted in English, but you can indicate a preference for providing you contribution in a language in which you feel more at ease; sessions in several languages are being planned.

Proposed contributions which follow the main theme of the congress – the convergence of publishing, librarianship and IT – will be welcome, but so will papers on any topic relating to the provision of health information.

Arne Jakobsson, who chairs the ICML programme team, hopes that the parallel sessions will provide a high-quality mixture of theory, research and good practice and expects that delegates will carry away notebooks full of new ideas which will make their libraries and information services more relevant and more successful. Arne reports that over 100 abstracts have already been submitted and expects that the final total will be well over double that figure. With six parallel sessions and a huge variety of rooms within the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre to choose from the International Programme Committee are truly in a position to reflect the depth and variety of health librarianship throughout the world.

Arne Jakobsson