We are pleased to invite you to the 10th Panhellenic Academic Libraries Conference (PALC), which this year is organized by the Library of our Institution. The general subject of the Conference is Management in Academic Libraries .

Looking closer into the notion of Management, we discover the existence of a variety of definitions, which differentiate significantly through time. In 1979 the Chairman of the American Association for Management put forth the following definition: "Management is to make certain things through other people". A more recent definition talks about "The way of working with others, through others towards achieving subjective goals of the organization and its members". The most modern definition emphasizes more on the role of people inside an organization, focuses on the results which have to be reached and adds the notion that the achievement of the members’ personal goals will have to be integrated with the goals of the organization.

All the above definitions can be substantiated and are applicable to the environment of libraries. But the Management of Academic Libraries seems to be more complicated than that of a typical commercial company. The non-profit character of Academic Libraries, their dominant role in providing access to information and knowledge and their participation in the educational and research activities of their University, prohibits us from thoughtlessly accepting the above definitions, which in the case of Academic Libraries seem over-simplified.

In addition, the Management of Academic Libraries in the modern era is characterized by a significant variety of styles and is extended, beyond the typical issues of organization and administration of human and material resources, into issues of technology, innovation and activity in shaping the components of the Information Society. Thus, within the limits of modern Management of Academic Libraries, are included the Management of Services, the Management of Information and the Management of Access.

These lines of thought have guided us into analyzing the general subject of the Conference into the following subdivisions:

1. Library Management: Personnel management, Funds management, Library management systems, Library organization, Management of change, Current and future role of librarians, The role of the library director, Library status and participation in higher education, Legal framework of Academic Libraries, Digital libraries, etc.
2. Management of Services: Organizing and redesigning library services, Information services, New services, Electronic services, Services to disabilities users, Remote services, Support of lifelong and self-learning, marketing and promotion of services / material, etc.
3. 3. Management of Information: Bibliographic control and organization of information, Current and retrospective cataloguing, Digitization, MARC format, Opacs and library systems, Thesauri, Subject Headings, Authorities, Metadata, etc.
4. 4. Management of Access: Systems for accessing the information, Remote access, Access rights, Copyright, Common access, Common access rights, Management of access accounts, etc.

The term “Management”

The English term “Management” is conveyed in part by the Greek term “Business Organization and Administration”. Because, however, the English term has a wider meaning than the Greek one, it has been transliterated into “Μάνατζμεντ” and has been accepted mainly under this form in the relevant economic and scientific circles. Recently, Georgios Babiniotis in the “Dictionary of the Modern Greek Language” (ed. 1998) is using a new Greek term for the term “Management”, the term “Διοικητική” (Diikitiki), which seems to be closer to the meaning of the English term. Despite all this, for the title of the Conference the term “Management” was preferred, which from our Library’s experience proves to be the most widespread to this moment.

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