The conference, "European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the past," will be held on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in early May 2005. It is intended to provide an opportunity to examine the ideas and related institution-building activities of a group of early Twentieth Century European thinkers, strongly modernist in outlook, about how best to create, disseminate and manage publicly available information. By exploring this early European context, the conference and associated events, will offer a challenge to widely held assumptions about the origins and nature of the globalized, "post modern" information society of today.