Report presented to the 41st General Assembly of BETH: 8-12 September 2012, Belfast.

The number of members of FIDES amounts 84 libraries. The 17th General Assembly of FIDES was held on Sept. 12-14 2011 in Cracow. Its programme included a half day symposium in the new library of the Pontifical University of John Paul II.

FIDES continues its previous activities and projects. Three our “traditional” central services are pre-sent in the Internet: a website, a multi browser FIDKAR (with 50 searchable catalogues and almost the same amount of bibliographical databases) and a digital library. FIDES cooperates also with the Polish central academic catalogue NUKAT distributing a database with authority files among members and some public libraries using the same software. From June 2011 FIDES has its fan page on Facebook and the number of fans amounts 185.

The digital library of FIDES (http://digital.fides.org.pl) is growing slowly and regularly.  About 200 new items have been added during a year and now it comprises 1234 publications. These digital resources are available also via European Digital Library “Europeana”. It is thanks to the Polish Digital Libraries Federation to which the FIDES library belongs. In August 2012 a new Data Exchange Agreement with the Europeana Foundation was signed by FIDES as the data provider, concerning mostly the intellectual property rights to metadata.

Since April 2011 a new project is now being realized – an online theological bibliographical database (EBNT = "Elektroniczna Bibliografia Nauk Teologicznych" (Polish)). It indexes articles and essays published mostly since 1980 in about 180 Polish periodicals in theology and religious studies and in Fest-schriften and congress publications. In this project FIDES cooperates with the National Library of Poland and receives new bibliographical records every month. As the National Library indexes only periodicals, FIDES provides records of articles and essays from other publications and also retrospective indexing for some journal issues. This database is freely accessible from the FIDES website – http://www.fides.org.pl/cgi-bin/ebnt/makwww.exe. At the moment the total number of records is more than 75,000.

(2012-08-30)