In the last few years sciences have improved by new electronic means, not only to create huge data bases and providing tools for data reduction, but also in electronic publishing (EP) and information exchange.

One of the most powerful aids apart from E-Mail and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the World Wide Web (WWW or W3), which has developed from the "toy" status to a very fast publication means, useful for announcing meetings, presenting institutes and working groups, providing the latest data about equipment, and nowadays also for publishing. Right from the start WWW was intended as a scientific tool developed at CERN, but soon was adopted by the whole society, at least in some countries with approriate and cheap telecommunication infrastructure. Thus in addition to the tools (like browsers) developed by scientists, commerial products arose and the language of the Web, HyperText Markup Language - HTML, came into Babylonian trouble. To create future standards and secure the general accessibility, the WWW Consortium (W3C) formed, which has created the current (but still unsupported) standards HTML 4.0 and CSS 2.0, and is developing further scientificaly relevant techniques, namely XML, XSL, and DOM.

To focus on astrophysics, literature search in the good old libraries was supported by electronic search engines, litearature data bases, and preprint servers, e.g. ADS, CDS, and XXX, and publishing in printed journals including the well-tried referee process was extended by electronic versions, in different quality and accessibility. That EP is of enhanced importance today can be seen e.g. by the controversial panel discussion at the "AG Tagung" in Insbruck 1997 after the talk "Electronic publishing in its context and in a professional perspective" by André Heck (1998, Reviews in Modern Astronomy 11, 337).

Let me stress a few aspects which, from my personal point of view are import in future:

• We need an international referee process decoupled from journals or publishers and revised international copyright laws doing justice to sciences.
• Scientists have to stay involved in modern techniques, i.e. knowing the basics of T_EX, HTML etc., and every institution needs scientists especially trained in these subjects.
• Continent based mirror servers should be erected providing certified scientific information easily and freely accessible for the whole international community.

As a small step in this respect we present these proceedings in two different versions. One is the classical book (constructed with the typesetting system T_EX & L_AT_EX), which is published and distributed by the Shaker Verlag, the second is the electronic version (written in HTML) on the WWW server of the Astronomical Institutes of the University of Bonn. The latter can be visited via the following Uniform Resource Locator (URL):

I hope that the electronic version will be a fruitful and frequently visited supplement to the printed version [published by the Shaker Verlag, ISBN 3-8265-4457-9].

Jochen M. Braun Bonn, October 1998

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