With the expansion of the World Wide Web during the last decade, libraries and their standards face an ever-complex environment, with new types, genres and forms of information resources. Changing information network structures and the emergence of new retrieval methods all play their roles.

A three day conference was held in Lisbon, Portugal in March 2006, in order to review the current state of bibliographic standards and to discuss a number of questions in charting a future for their development.