Librarianship in Israel

Snunith Shoham is the Chair of the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She received her Ph.D from the School of Information Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA. Dr Shoham has published many professional articles and three books, the newest one, Library Classification and Browsing: The Conjunction of Books and Readers, is scheduled to be published during the summer of 2000 by the Sussex Academic Press, United Kingdom. The mother of four children, she is actively involved in many library-related projects and currently serves as the Vice-Chair of the National Council for Public Libraries and is on the Board of Directors of the Israeli Center for Libraries. She serves as the Chair of the National Annual Conferences of Librarians in Israel, and previously served as Chair of the International Conference of IASL that took place in 1998 in Israel. Dr Shoham is also on the Local Organizing Committee of IFLA 2000 in Jerusalem, and may be contacted at the Department of Information Science, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel (fax: +(972-3) 5353937; e-mail: [email protected]). The Historical Perspective