Mid-September - amidst the local harvest season with very agreeable climate and with the surrounding nature in one of its most beautiful states of the year - is a near-ideal time to visit Graz. Graz is the capital of the Austrian Province of Styria and with about 250,000 citizens Austria's second largest city. The unique Old Town of Graz was awarded World Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 1999. In 2003 Graz will be the European Cultural Capital.

OPAC-1 will be held at the picturesque University of Graz (Campus) premises, located only a 10-min walk from the city center. University of Graz hosts around 25,000 students of all disciplines and is, together with the Technical University of Graz (~10,000 students) and the Graz University for Music and the Performing Arts (~2,000 students), a main contributor to the appealing "Graz way of life" atmosphere so hard to miss for those who got to breathe it.