The first international Recorder conference took place in Luxembourg on the 1st and 2nd of december 2005. The theme of the conference was collating and managing natural science field and collection records in Europe.
The implementation of Recorder in Luxembourg and the collection management extension to Recorder between 2001 and 2004 did not remain unnoticed by the people involved in the domain of natural history from neighbouring countries. During this period, the biodocumentation center of Saarland, the floristic network of Germany and the Leiden Museum of the Netherlands for example were looking for a suitable data management software handling field and collection data. When they heard about Recorder through their contacts with people from the Luxembourg ministry of culture and the natural history museum, they were very interested to get to know the project in more detail.
To respond to the growing interest from organisations outside the UK, two key people in the Recorder project, Charles Copp and Guy Colling, launched the idea of an international Recorder conference. Charles Copp had designed the NBN data model on which the Recorder application was built and accompanied the Recorder project since its beginnings in the UK. Guy Colling, had been the initiator of the Recorder implementation at the Luxembourg Museum and of the development of the collection management extension for Recorder. The Luxembourg museum of natural history agreed to be the convener and organizing institution of the international Recorder conference on the condition that it got financial support from the Luxembourg national research fund (FNR).
The objective of the conference was to give an overview of the Recorder project, to show its link to other international projects, to allow networking between Recorder users and developers, and to discuss about the problems of developing, disseminating and sustainably supporting an international version of Recorder and associated software and to discuss proposals for future action.