M.N. Seetharaman, Formerly, Head, Information Centre for Aeronautics NAL, Bangalore & Chief Librarian, IIT Madras My fellow professionals, As we are all aware, international conferences organized by scholarly societies, science academies and professional associations provide a forum for scientists and engineers to make presentations about their findings on cutting-edge research projects, know about current and future trends and directions and network with professional colleagues and work out collaborations. It is only at these conferences that research results, new ideas and innovations, methodologies, best practices etc., are first presented and debated much before they find mention in journals, books and monographs. According to a survey conducted by INSDOC several years ago, only IISc. Library has the largest collections of conference proceedings. Next comes NAL Library with nearly 10,000 titles, covering mostly aerospace and engineering disciplines. NAL Library used two acquisition tools, namely: Directory of Published Proceedings (published by InterDok Corporation, USA) and Index to Conference Proceedings Received by the British Lending Library Requests for ILL that were received by NAL Library were mostly for conference papers/ proceedings. It is no exaggeration to say that NAL Library (now ICAST) became as one of the well-known and widely-used libraries in the country, particularly by the scientific, technical and academic communities, because of the services offered (thanks to Dr. IRN Goudar and his successors) and specialized collections, particularly conference proceedings, technical reports, engineering standards etc. Although conference proceedings have gone electronic, there are still a large number of users who prefer print, because of several advantages offered by print format. However, conference proceedings in print format are considered as grey literature, and there is no single source of supply, resulting in difficulties for libraries to identify -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.