Art.1: Hanna Celoch
Thoughts on the Education in the Lublin Polytechnics Library

The author describes the latest changes in library environment and staff effort to adapt to them. The automation of libraries forced staff to change their attitudes and to face new challenges. The article aims at presenting these changes in a context of the Lublin Polytechnics Library. The author shares her reflections on the librarians' level of education. She sees the professional development as a constant process, in which self study, cooperation and shared experience play an important role. She calls for workshops and courses to be offered in academic libraries for staff as well as users.

Art.2: Anna Komperda
The Teaching Library

The article refers to an international conferences, "The Teaching Library" that took place in Bern, Switzerland in 1997. This text presents a notion of an academic library that can and should play and an important role in an educational process. The function of a library lies in providing training in searching for the information, source evaluation, and accessing variety of on-line databases. This training should be offered to academics, students, and any other clients using network resources. There should also be a schedule of courses designed to extend professional skills of a library staff. The first step in creating an educational program is an adequate expert background and cooperation between librarians - reference specialists, subject librarians, and IT staff. Educational activities give a library an opportunity to improve professional prestige, and to represent librarians as well educated experts, whose knowledge and skills are unreplaceable in an information society.

Art.3: Magdalena Kubista-Wrobel, Close Memories
The Central Library at Karol Adamiecki Economic Academy in Katowice Experiences in Area of Library Education

The article discusses dilemmas related to education in a modern, automated library. The educational aspect of a library is directed at the professional development of staff, but it aims also at improving users skills in searching the traditional and electronic sources of information. The author's reflections are base on experience of the Central Library at Karol Adamiecki Economic Academy in Katowice. The PC and library systems training offered to staff, definitely improved at the beginning of 1990's, when the library became automated. The Silesia Consortium of Academic Libraries, created in 1995, offered further educational opportunities as a part of the TEMPUS project. The cooperation with other countries (Belgium, France, Germany and Great Britain) had been developed under the auspices of the Consortium and this lead to the implementation of the InfoWare CD/HD system to access CD-roms and SCI, SSCI databases via a network. The involvement of staff in providing instructions to users in this new environment was essential. Professional qualifications were also improved by allowing the staff to take part in international conferences, visit libraries in Poland and abroad, and participate in foreign language courses. The user training in the area of OPAC, CD-rom and Internet searching has also played an important part in an educational aspect of the Library.

Art.4: Maciej Dron
A Post-Graduated Program, a Few Impressions from a Former Student

The author participated in post-graduated courses offered by the Faculty of Library and Information Science at the Silesia University in 1998/99. This comprehensive library study, aimed at the graduates of the master programs of non-library related faculties, covered two semesters and 210 credits. School librarians, who wanted to improve their professional qualifications, and teachers, planning to work in libraries dominated among students. The group dynamics soon shown that most students saw obtaining their diplomas as formality and did not care about improving their qualifications. This problem was especially visible during the courses related to library automation, as school and public libraries are far behind the academic libraries in the process of implementing new technologies. The author suggests that a popular at other faculties, grading system based on number of points, would improve the quality of library education and would eliminate the enlistment and graduation of casual, disinterested students.

Art.5: Marzena Marcinek
Impressions from the 20th IATUL Conference "The Future of Libraries in Human Communication"

IATUL (International Association of Technological University Libraries) is a nonprofit organization established in 1955 to promote effective cooperation among its member university libraries. IATUL is affiliated with the IFLA/FIAB. An ordinary membership is available for the libraries at academic institutions that offer appropriate courses in engineering, natural science or technology. Other categories of membership are available upon invitation of the Board of Directors of IATUL. IATUL organizes conferences, seminars and some regional meetings. It publishes IATUL News and IATUL Proceedings. Since 1994 these publications are available on the Internet. This year the IATUL conference was held at the Technical University of Crete in Chania, Greece. The theme of the conference was The Future of Libraries in Human Communication with the sub-themes: The Changing Role of the library, Focus on Users, The Librarian of the 21st Century and Management of Technological Change. The author's impressions from the visit to Crete are also included in this account.

Art.6: Jolanta Wrobel
Behind the "Wide Water"

The article describes an exciting trip called "Study Tour" to the USA. Five Polish librarians having opportunity to visit American libraries travelled by plane, by car and by train to talk and attend the meetings at some most prestigious libraries (just to mention The Library of Congress). Thanks to indefatigable guide - Mrs Barbara Rodes (the director of WWF in that time) the librarians took advantage of professional lectures and first of all the participation at the 87th Annual Meeting of the Special Libraries Association.

Art.7: Barbara Makarska-Deszcz
All - Polish offer of workshops in the Library of the Wroclaw University of Technology

The article presents the history of professional workshops entitled " Library & Information Computer Systems", These workshops have been carried out for over 15 years and all the time are updated and widen according to the needs & expectations of the participants.