Report
of the Seventh Meeting of the Baltic Division of UNGEGN

The meeting was held in New York, at United Nations Headquarters, conference room 3, 27 April 2004.

Six experts from three member countries of the Baltic Division participated: Ms Danutė Mardosienė (Lithuania), Ms Vita Strautniece and Ms Ieva Kaģe (Latvia), Ms Malle Hunt, Mr Peeter Päll and Ms Elvi Sepp (Estonia).

The meeting was chaired by Ms Danutė Mardosienė. Ms Elvi Sepp acted as secretary to the meeting.

The agenda of the meeting included:

1. Organizational matters of the next meeting of the Baltic Division.
2. The arrangement of the UNGEGN working group meeting in a Baltic country.
3. Publicising information/news about the Baltic Division in the UNGEGN Information Bulletin.

1. In the discussion about the Baltic Division's next activity all the participants of the meeting took part actively. Such matters as agenda items and working principles (language), time, length and place of the meeting, also invited persons (countries) and covering of expenses were under debate.

The representatives of all three Baltic countries expressed their opinion. The following decisions were accepted:

• 1) the next Baltic Division meeting would be held in Lithuania, in the second half of September or in the first half of October this year as a two-day meeting;
• 2) suggested provisional place of the meeting would be Vilnius, Trakai or some other place near by the capital city;
• 3) the working languages will be English and Russian;
• 4) the agenda will follow the standard agenda of UNGEGN meetings with one additional item, which concerns various information about names authorities of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; also composing a special questionary was under discussion;
• 5) the participants of the meeting should be made available at the expense of the institutions, which they represent.

2. On Ms Strautniece's initiative the question was discussed about the arrangement of the UNGEGN working group and Baltic Division's joint meeting in the Baltic area. In accordance with the information we had, the working group on Toponymic Data Files and Gazetteers is seeking for the place of meeting in Baltic.

The majority of the participants favoured the proposal of the Baltic Division to organize the next meeting of the Working Group on Toponymic Data Files and Gazetteers in Latvia.

Ms Vita Strautniece, after consultations with appropriate authorities of Latvia, will forward the proposal for consideration to the Convenor of the Working Group.

3. In regard to publicising some information or news about the activities of the Baltic Division in the UNGEGN Information Bulletin, all the participants agreed, that such an initiative would be welcome.

The information about the very successful summer-seminar in Kihnu was too late for the last UNGEGN Information Bulletin, which was issued in December 2003. As a compromise will be the joint (mixed) news, which would include information about the different activities and events in the Baltic Division - recently and formerly arranged.

Danutė Mardosienė
Chair of the meeting

Elvi Sepp
Secretary of the meeting