"The Clearing House exists to provide adequate sports information services on European level in order to improve and facilitate collaboration in the field of sport in general and sports policy in particular ". To fulfill this European mission, the Clearing House focusses on the priorities and needs of sports policy makers on European, national or local level both within governmental and non-governmental (sports) organisations. The centre has five major objectives : Objective 1 - Preparing added-value information through a trans-national approach. The task of the Clearing House is not restricted to the collection and dissemination of sports policy data. This added-value provided by the Clearing House results from the transnational nature of the data as well as the way data are collected, classified, compared or summarised in a larger European context. Objective 2 - Producing relevant sports policy matters in Europe. The information produced by the Clearing House plays an underpinning role for the sports programme of the Council of Europe. Therefore its services must match the key areas of that programme. Objective 3 - Increasing the impact and visibility of the European work. The Clearing House offers an extra dimension to the work of the Council of Europe in the field of sport. Through a broader dissemination of the data and a higher degree of accessibility of the data, the Clearing House upgrades the value of the work of the CDDS and increases the chance for concrete implementation on national, regional or local level. Objective 4 - Sharing policy information or guarantee a minimum level of information. (Access to) information as a discriminating factor is hard to conceal with the basic principles of a democratic society (cfr Article 11 of the European Sports Charter) The Clearing House guarantees a certain level of free access to relevant and qualitative information related to sports policy in Europe. Objective 5 - Location of specific data. The Clearing House develops services and instruments that allow its main user group to locate in a fast and efficient manner the information required. "Helping the users in locating the information they are looking for" is a relatively new aspect of the work of the Clearing House.