The organization of ISIS 3 on the occasion of CRICS8 will give an opportunity to bring together the international ISIS community, information and computer professionals, national and regional distributors, end users, financing organizations and all persons interested in the promotion of equal access to information.

ISIS3 has an overall objective to exchange ideas and experiences about new developments of the ISIS platform, with special focus on library and documentation centre services. The Congress will be designed around three main thematic axes:

• conformity of new ISIS systems with modern solutions and upgrading of existing platforms;
  
• management of the network based platform (ISIS NBP) and other open source platforms; and
  
• strengthening the ISIS community of developers, users and managers.

More specifically, ISIS3 will analyse proposals about the future status of ISIS and will present the latest ISIS developments: ABCD (integrated online automated management system for libraries and documentation centers); ISIS NBP (new ISIS network-based platform) and JISIS (Winisis replacement software based on Berkeley DB).

It is hoped that the Congress will mark the renewal of ISIS putting it in line with the state-of-the-art information storage and retrieval systems.

CDS/ISIS is an advanced non-numerical information storage and retrieval software developed by UNESCO to satisfy the need of many institutions, especially in developing countries, to be able to streamline their information processing activities by using modern (and relatively inexpensive) technologies.