Due to an editorial mistake in our last issue dealing with consortia, the name of Roel Tilly of Maastricht University Library was left out as co-author of Alex Klugkist`s article on „Consortium Building and Licensing by University Libraries in the Netherlands”.

More than half of the present issue is filled by Michael Smethurst’s detailed report on the activities of the European national libraries during the last year. It contains valuable information on finances, legislation, building, preservation policy, electronic services and various other fields.

Lex Sijtsma’s contribution about the Dutch project on legal deposit for electronic publications deals more extensively with one of the aspects mentioned in the report on the national libraries. The handling of electronic documents involves several problems such as bibliographic control, authenticity, or archiving. From a practical point of view the effort of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague at devising a workflow for the new material has certainly far-reaching implications.

When reading the article by Gernot Gabel – an excellent connoisseur of the French library scene - one cannot help thinking that in the last few years a new era has begun for the university libraries in France. In the wake of decentralization university libraries outside Paris are flourishing.

In Germany with its various co-operative cataloguing systems a central union catalogue recording holdings of the majority of academic libraries would still be wishful thinking had not Karlsruhe University Library come up with the idea to develop a search interface combining several catalogues. Michael Mönnich briefly describes the very successful concept of the „Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog”.