In the year 2016 the association celebrates its 25th anniversary. On this occasion the 22nd General Assembly of FIDES will be held on Sept. 12-14, 2016 in the Main Library of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. The number of members of FIDES amounts 85 libraries.

The main project undertaken by FIDES since June 2014 is the union catalogue of FIDES libraries which uses Koha system. There is one installation of the system on FIDES’ server, which is accessible via the Internet. The aim is to have one bibliographical record for all items from different libraries. The catalogue is fully con-trolled by authority files. As a rule, shared cataloguing of new documents in Polish NUKAT union database is adopted. Our project is based on strong cooperation with NUKAT – the union catalogue of Polish re-search and academic libraries (http://katalog.nukat.edu.pl/). Thus member libraries participating in the project are also members of NUKAT community. It helps to provide information about our holdings to the academic community and to promote religious and theological books. At the same time the cooperation with NUKAT allows church librarians to improve their cataloguing skills.

By now we have twelve member libraries participating in the project. Next libraries are expected to join in the nearest future. The number of records in FIDES catalogue amounts now more than 300,000. The catalogue covers more than 800,000 items (volumes). The impact of these libraries on NUKAT database is about 6,000 bibliographic records and about 3,000 authority records during last two years. The catalogue can be accessed at http://katalog.fides.org.pl/. These twelve libraries are mainly small (one-person) and middle size libraries, as more reach libraries of catholic universities and other institutions are able to use commercial integrated library systems. There are such other nine FIDES libraries cooperating with NUKAT catalogue separately.

FIDES continues also its previous activities and projects. Three other central services are present in the Internet: an online theological bibliographical database, a digital library and a multi browser FIDKAR (with about 80 searchable catalogues and bibliographical databases). The theological bibliographical database (EBNT = “Elektroniczna Bibliografia Nauk Teologicznych” [Electronic Bibliography of Theology and Religion]) indexes articles and essays published mostly since 1980 in about 200 Polish periodicals on theology, philosophy and religious studies and in more than 500 Festschriften and congress publications. In this project FIDES cooperates with the National Library of Poland and receives from it 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 accessible from the FIDES website. At the moment the total number of records is more than 100,000. It can be accessed at http://biblio.fides.org.pl/. The digital library of FIDES (http://digital.fides.org.pl/) comprises 1690 publications. These digital resources are available also via European Digital Library “Europeana”.

Two issues of the semi-annual bulletin “Fides” were published in 2016. The bulletin is fully digitised from the first issue in 1995 and fully indexed, and available from the Federation’s web services. In April a training seminary for librarians devoted to the topic of conservation of old prints was organised in Toruń in cooperation with Nicolaus Copernicus University. From June 2011 FIDES has its fan page on Facebook and the number of fans amounts 480.

Fr. Jerzy Witczak