Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in all industrial countries have a great need for technical and scientific data and product and market information. SMEs also produce useful information of mutual benefit for themselves. A proper and healthy development of SMEs in developing as well as in many industrialized countries in Europe and elsewhere will require a number of support services among which the development of infrastructural information services is a key element. Rapid progress in information technologies has reduced the cost and increased the availability of powerful workstations, personal computers and new communication facilities. This has created new opportunites for using these and other appropriate technologies to conceive practical data base and information services for SMEs. These proceedings of an international seminar on distributed database systems for SMEs held in Beijing in May 1989 gives recommendations on operational concepts, methodology and technologies to be applied in the various stages of infrastructural evolution.