Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th East European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems, ADBIS 2001, held in Vilnius, Lithuania, in September 2001. The 25 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper and two abstracts of invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on query optimization, multimedia and multilingual information systems, spatiotemporal aspects of databases, data mining, transaction processing, conceptual modeling and information systems specification, active databases, query methods, XML, and information systems design.