Editorial

Ulrike Scholle & Peter te Boekhorst

A considerable part of the articles published in this issue of LIBER Quarterly are papers presented at this year’s annual general conference that took place in July at the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague. More than 150 colleagues from 35 countries took part in the last conference of this century. Many participants came from East European countries. Anyone interested in the dramatic transformations and challenges the librarians in these countries are facing will gain new insight from reading Galina Kislovkaya’s first-hand account of „Ten Years of Change in Russia and its Effects on Libraries.“ According to Mirjam Foot who describes the situation in Western Europe „The only Certainty is Change.“

Library management is but one of the perspectives which the theme of the conference „Changing Missions, Changing Skills“ was analyzed from. Several arcticles deal with new developments in the field of preservation and emphasize the new demands on librarians. Beatrix Kastaly stresses the need for training initiatives in her article on „Changing Attitudes and New Demands in Preservation Training“. A very successful initiative in this context is the series of summer schools in Preservation Managment organised among other s by the LIBER Division on Preservation.

Once again, digitization of journal articles and retrospective digitization are focussed in several of the contributions. As projects in the United States and several European countries indicate, hardly any other field of the library profession seems to be changing so rapidly.

LIBER Quarterly, Volume 9 (1999), 265, No. 3