VALA 2004--Breaking Boundaries: Integration & Interoperability 12th Biennial Conference and Exhibition of the Victorian Association for Library Automation 3-5 February 2004 at the Melbourne Convention Centre (Conference Reports‪)‬

A bluffer's guide VALA 2004 included six plenary sessions and 42 concurrent sessions. With more than 720 delegates, the Melbourne Convention Centre was alive with library speak for at least a few days. The conference theme of Breaking Boundaries was chosen by VALA to reflect both the enormous successes and the key challenges in the field of library and information technology. The keynote speakers, drawn from the USA, France and China, were selected for their expertise and work with strategic projects of global interest. I found them to be mostly relevant, at least to a range of challenges directly facing us at the Australian War Memorial: developing digital archives; archiving of websites; the new role(s) of libraries in a networked online environment; and (technological) innovation itself.