Editorial
Trix Bakker

This double issue is very extensive, covering not only the 32nd LIBER Annual General Conference Extending the Network : libraries and their partners in the Biblioteca nazionale centrale in Rome, Italy, 17 - 21 June 2003, but also the Pre-conference National initiatives in library co-operation. In total 23 proceedings will be published - 3 of the pre-conference and 20 of the conference.

The conference was very well attended (about 170 participants). This year there were even two keynote speakers, professor Franco Salvatori (Università Tor Vergata, Roma, Italy) and Jay Jordan (President and Chief Executive Officer, OCLC, USA). Only the second keynote paper is published.

As usual, the sessions were organized by the four professional Divisions of LIBER, each of which had invited speakers in the context of the Aims & Scope of their Division.

  •   The Access Division had a session on "New publishing models".
  •   The Preservation Division on "Paper versus digital".
  •   The Collection Development Division on "Towards integrated resource discovery and access: co-operative arrangements between printed and manuscript collections to provide seamless access to materials".
  •   The Library Management and Administration Division on "Measures for partnership and cooperation".

One of the speakers in session 2, David Kohl (University of Cincinnatti), was unable to deliver his paper because he fell ill, but his article "Paper and digital repositories in the United States" speaks for itself, so it's also published in this issue.

Each session had such a variety of topics dealt with, that it can be said that the Conference as a whole offered a very actual (re)presentation of new developments, problems, but also challenges for research libraries in Europe and in the USA.

The local session "Italian Libraries towards the Future", organized by the Natalia Susanna Santucci, the conference organizer, gave a clear impression of the developments in Italian libraries.

The last paper "The Keystone Principles - Creation and Influence" of Laura Bender was supposed to be published last year in issue 2/3 after the conference in Graz. Because this didn't come true, it is published now. This paper discusses the development of the Keystone Principles, their sample action steps, and how these steps have been incorporated into the strategic planning of several organizations since their inception in 1999.

WEB SITES REFERRED TO IN THE TEXT

Access Division. http://www.kb.dk/guests/intl/liber/division/access/

Collection Development Division. http://www.kb.dk/guests/intl/liber/division/colldev/

The Keystone Principles. http://www.arl.org/newsltr/207/keystone.html

Library Management and Administration Division. http://www.kb.dk/guests/intl/liber//division/manag/

Preservation Division http://www.kb.dk/guests/intl/liber/division/preserv/




LIBER Quarterly, Volume 13 (2003), No. 3/4