FIDES had a very successful annual meeting at the Franciscan Spiritual Centre "Honoratianum" in Zakroczym near Warsaw 8-10 September 2008.  An official representative from the episcopate – bishop Andrzej Siemieniewski – was present.  The meeting included some lectures on preservation of some historical collections, and on technical and legal problems of digitalisation. The topics of gaining funds (especially from the European Community cultural heritage funds) and the future of the association were discussed. The main problem encountered is a collapse of a software currently being used in almost all FIDES libraries, which is not supported and developed by its producer – National Library of Poland.

FIDES continues all its previous activities and projects. Our colleague Fr. Krzysztof Gonet who acts as an representative of FIDES, supplies a software service for church libraries and public libraries, bringing the name of FIDES into the public arena in general, which brings in an additional small income.  From him members of FIDES and other libraries (e.g. public libraries) are regularly receiving an adapted copy of an authority files database, produced by the Polish academic libraries consortium NUKAT. Four our central services are present in Internet: Website, central catalogue, a browser FIDKAR and a digital library, which comprises now almost 500 publications.

Two continued projects are:

1. shifting all of FIDES libraries to the use of MARC 21 formatting (currently only a few). This requires a handbook which is being prepared and then a series of conversions of catalogue databases which will be done by our colleague;
2. creating a theological thesaurus with subject headings (key words with definitions, relations and rules of use) for cataloguing in FIDES libraries.