I outline the goals of the `Declaration concerning the Evolving Rôle of Libraries in Research Centres' and describe progress in obtaining its official adoption as IAU policy.

A thorough search of the OGLE-III microlensing project has more than doubled the total sample of PNe known to have close binary central stars. These discoveries have enabled close binary induced morphological trends to be revealed for the first time. Canonical bipolar nebulae, low-ionisation structures and polar outflows are all identified within

We present high resolution absorption-line spectroscopy of 3 face-on galaxies, NGC 98, NGC 600, and NGC 1703 with the aim of searching for box/peanut (B/P)-shaped bulges. These observations test and confirm the prediction of citet{deb_etal_05} that face-on B/P-shaped bulges can be recognized by a double minimum in the profile of the fourth-order

A review of the results of the Near-IR S0 galaxy Survey (NIRS0S) is presented. NIRS0S is a magnitude (mB 12.5 mag) and inclination ( 65o) limited sample of 200 nearby galaxies, mainly S0s. It uses deep Ks -band images, typically reaching a surface brightness of 23.5 mag arcsec^(-2) . Detailed visual and photometric classifications were made, for

We present our recent results on the properties of the outskirts of disk galaxies. In particular, we focus on spiral galaxies with stellar disk truncations in their radial surface brightness profiles. Using SDSS, UDF and GOODS data we show how the position of the break (i.e., a direct estimator of the size of the stellar disk) evolves with time

The luminosity function is not only crucial to know stellar density distribution in space, and thus to know the structure of the Galaxy, but it allows the determination of the stellar mass function using the mass-luminosity relationship. The luminosity function and mass function are fundamental to the understanding of star formation and the