The Annual Meeting of the International Association for Sports Information was hosted by the Instituto do Desporto de Portugal (Sports Institute of Portugal) and was held in the meeting’s hotel, the Hotel Tivoli Tejo Lisboa. Prior to the IASI Annual Meeting, our hosts organized a conference, International Conference on Sports Information, (April 14-16, 2004) with the theme, The New Challenges for Sports Information. Attended by IASI members, sports information professionals, academics and administrators, the international conference featured invited speeches and free communication papers with translation services.

President Alain Poncet called the IASI Annual Meeting to order on Sunday, April 18th. The major topics that were discussed included the IASI website contents and policy, the new relationship with the IOC’s Information Director, Philippe Blanchard, the policy document on the IASI-SIRC cooperative relationship, the plans for the forthcoming 2005 IASI World Congress in Beijing, the IASI marketing strategy, support for developing countries, the IASI budget and the membership survey.

The focus of the meeting was the signing of two important documents, the IASI-SIRC Statement of Cooperation, Letter of Agreement (LOA) and the IASI Website, Archives and Information Policy. SIRC is a very important organization for sport information and, an essential cooperative partner with IASI. SIRC has hosted the IASI Website for many years and both organizations have a mandate to provide information and serve the educational and research needs of sport organizations, sport administrators, teachers, coaches, and sport sciences researchers and as such, members have a mutual interest in the wellbeing and comprehensiveness of SIRC’s main product, the international database, SPORTDiscus. One outcome of signing the LOA is the establishment of the International Contributors Committee, which will become a standing committee of IASI. Both documents outline the important points of this interrelationship and state the expectations of each organization.

Reorganized and renewed ad hoc working groups were formed for development of a

• marketing plan,
• conducting a membership survey
• the COMPASS group (sports statistics)
• on coordinating information on Events Results

The three hour workshop on Saturday afternoon was conducted by SIRC President Debra Gassewitz and SIRC librarian Diane O’Dwyer. In the first section, Debra Gassewitz gave an overview of the current status of the international database SPORTDiscus, the work of the cooperative partners, the varied marketing activities for the SPORTDiscus, document delivery and the information resources accessible on the SIRC website.

Diane O’Dwyer then gave an overview of key field structure, physical description, and indexing procedures for indexing resources for SPORTDiscus. In an information packet given to workshop participants, the handouts included a document on writing abstracts for advanced level literature, guidelines for indexing basic level literature, a reproduction of her Powerpoint presentation on indexing and A Quick Guide to Searching the SPORTDiscus on WEBSPIRS.

(Please note that May issue of the IASI Newsletter has the details of information on SIRC and SPORTDiscus and the Annual Meeting Minutes are now available. Both documents will be placed on the IASI website http://www.iasi.org/ )

The Program Committee for the 12th IASI World Congress met during the IASI Annual Meeting to select the keynote speakers and discuss various details of the Congress. The Second Announcement has been published and is available on the Congress website.

A reminder to all who are contemplating presenting a paper at the forthcoming IASI World Congress. September 30, 2004 is the deadline to send abstracts to the Program Chair, Ms Cindy Slater (cindy.slater@usoc.org ). See the congress website for details and format for the papers and posters abstracts.

IASI welcomes papers and posters from the ICSSPE community of associations. Please see the website for details of the 5 themes:

Information Services for Olympic Games and International Competitions

Sport Archives and Digitalization

Sport Statistics, Standards & Services

Sport Information for Elite Athlete Development

Future Needs of Sport Information