After having completed the present edition of the proceedings of our workshop on "The Magellanic Clouds and Other Dwarf Galaxies" we wish to express our gratitude to all contributors. The concept of our 'Graduiertenkolleg' is meant to provide an efficient framework for graduate education and research and to foster not only the relations between students and supervisors but also between students and distinguished representatives of the community of our field of research. In this sense the graduate school can be seen as an attempt to realize the old (and often forgotten) idea of unifying teaching and research at universities. This edition is a handy manifestation.
We remember quite well that, when we tried to expand our scientific ambitions centered on the Magellanic Clouds, the extension "... and Other Dwarf Galaxies" sounded meaningless to many ears. Looking at the entire collection of reviews, talks and posters addressing such a large variety of astrophysical issues, it now seems to us that no better headline for merging the various interests within our graduate school could have been found.
We hope that it is of interest for many researchers to have a look at the extensive key word and object lists (see the apendices "Subject Index" and "List of Objects") to quickly find specific information among the wealth of topics and objects, which appear in contributed talks and posters. We also hope that the attractive cover (designed by Michael Hilker and Sven Kohle) strengthens the wish of a potential reader to know what is in the book.
We wish to thank our publisher Shaker Verlag, namely Dr. Shaker, for giving us the permission to make the proceedings available in free electronic form on our webserver (see also the next preface about "Electronic Publishing") and all the participants (see the "List of Participants") for their help in creating a fascinating workshop, for their contributions, and of course for further supporting the electronic version with updates and new links. We very much appreciate the contribution by Joachim Köppen, who fell sick shortly before the workshop and could not participate.
Considering the statistics of incoming contributions (see electronic version, at the URL: http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~webgk/ws98/techinf_a.html#subm), it is noteworthy that the first contribution was a review, and so was the last. The distribution of time of the arrival of the reviews was nearly homogeneous, whereas the one for the talks and especially for the posters was peaking at our deadline.
Many thanks go to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft as the funding institution of the Graduiertenkolleg and also for supporting this workshop.
| First version: | 18th | August, | 1998 |
| Last update: | 22nd | October, | 1998 |
