A meeting was held at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, United Kingdom to discuss recent progress in the development of EMD, a database for maps determined by electron microscopy that is now integrated with MSD, the macromolecular structure database at EBI. This meeting of representatives of many of the major image processing groups in electron microscopy also discussed possible software developments that would ease the documentation and deposition of such datasets. The meeting concluded with a strong endorsement of map deposition in electron microscopy and its linkage with the family of archival databases in biomedical research.