The encouragement to organise this Mini-Workshop comes from the successes of the Workshop at Bled/Ljubljana in 1987 ("Mesonic Degrees of Freedom in Hadrons"), as well as several similar Mini-Workshops organised since 1999 by M. Rosina, B. Golli, R. Krivec, and S. Sirca (Ljubljana):

• "Hadrons as Solitons", July 7-17, 1999
• "Few-Quark Problems", July 8-15, 2000
• "Selected Few-Body Problems in Hadronic and Atomic Physics", July 7-14, 2001
• "Quarks and Hadrons", July 7-14, 2002
• "Effective Quark-Quark Interaction", July 7-14, 2003
• "Quark Dynamics", July 12-19, 2004
• "Exciting hadrons", July 11-18, 2005
• "Progress in Quark Models", July 10-17, 2006
• "Hadron Structure and Lattice QCD", July 9-16, 2007

• In addition to these, a series of Mini-Workshops dedicated to "What Comes beyond the Standard Model" have been organised by Norma Mankoc Borstnik (Ljubljana) and Holger Bech Nielsen (Copenhagen) in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.

Josip Plemelj (born 1873) who bequeathed his Villa to the Society of Mathematicians, Physicists and Astronomers of Slovenia, was a renowned mathematician working in the field of linear differential equations and numerous other research areas of pure and applied mathematics. For his work, he was awarded several prizes, and was an elected member of the Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade and Munich academies of sciences. In 1919, he became the first rector of the University of Ljubljana.