As we announced in volume 29, number 1, of 2006, the publication of the two issues of the Revista Interamericana de Bibliotecología (RIB) would be dedicated to the Inter-American School of Library Science (EIB) in recognition of its fifty years of existence. This event took place with a commemorative session on October 19, 2006, in the assembly hall of the University of Antioquia, and, in November, with the First International Congress on Information Science, in which nationally known speakers participated. These events are treated extensively in the news section of this issue of the Revista and in the forthcoming book that summarizes the development of the EIB over its fifty-year history, along with a booklet on the statistics of this period.

This issue, number two of the RIB in 2006, as well as the previous one, features the participation, not only of the professors of the EIB, but also that of its graduates and well known scholars from other countries.

The lead article in this issue of the Revista is a timely one, given its topic and its significance in curriculum development. It is the product of rigorous research that analyzes the extent to which virtual education has been accepted in the EIB, and is written by two of its research professors and by the director of the Research Center of the EIB.

This issue continues with an article that is the product of a discipline that has nourished and complemented library science since its beginning—but seldom mentioned in the RIB—bibliography. The subject of art, aesthetics, and the history of art in Colombia is lacking a source to which interested persons can turn to find existing documents. The work undertaken by this EIB professor, currently director of the Department of Academic Training, in cooperation with a professor from the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Antioquia, rectifies this deficiency through the development of the Repertorio Bibliográfico: Arte, Estética e Historia del Arte en Colombia en el Período 1870-1929.

Terminology, key to the discipline of library science for the analysis of information, is a subject often treated in the RIB, and now returns in two articles as a result of terminological and documentary research. The dictionary of family and gender, and the one which, beginning with a traditional documentary thesaurus, develops an ontology in the context of a semantic webs—both are of supreme interest to documentalists and students of information technology.

In this issue, the Revista, always open to international contributions, publishes two articles by women scholars from other countries. The first, by a Cuban researcher living in Brazil who studied the preferences of Brazilian and Colombian librarians in terms of organizational climate. This article is the product of a doctoral thesis at the Universidad de Sao Paulo. The second article, by a researcher at the University Center for Library Research (CUIB) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), deals with a subject which, like the first, is very timely—the content of the digital library and its relevance to learning.

Once again we invite our readers to read carefully this new issue of the RIB, but most of all to respond to what they have read and to send us their own contributions—which hopefully will be products of new research that will contribute to the progress of our discipline.

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From these pages of the RIB, and upon the completion of the observance of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the EIB and 29 uninterrupted years of the Revista, I say farewell as director/editor of this publication, a responsibility that I have undertaken with great pleasure almost from its beginnings. I thank its collaborators as well as its authors and its readers for their assistance, their faith in the publication, and their constancy in reading the articles, as well as their acquisition. I am equally thankful to the directors of the EIB and their Research Center for their unconditional support. Likewise, I would like to welcome, on your behalf, EIB professor Sandra Arenas Grisales, who will be in charge of the administration and editing of the RIB beginning with volume 30, number 1, of 2007.

MARTHA ALICIA PÉREZ GÓMEZ
Directora/ Editora RIB
Traducción de Edwin S. Gleaves