Introduction/contents

Contents

Preface

This publication published on CD-Rom contains most of the papers that were presented during the annual meetings of the IGU-Commission on Evolving Issues of Geographical Marginality in the Early 21st Century World, held in Stockholm (2001), Durban (2002), Kathmandu (2003), and Stirling (2004). The original idea was to publish them in the series created by the publisher we used to work with. However, things took a different turn. After some irritating signals from that side, the editorial committee held a meeting with the representative of the publishers in 2004. It drew up a plan for a set of four to five books, and continued its editorial efforts. All of a sudden, the publisher withdrew and abandoned the series altogether. This put us into a difficult situation. In the end, it was decided to resort to a new means of diffusion, creating a CD-Rom with all the contributions received. It is possible to provide it with an ISBN, thus officialising it as a publication.

Several years have passed since the papers were presented, and some of the data may no longer be up to date. A few papers were never handed in for publication, two were withdrawn because published elsewhere. However, given the overall interest in the main topic and the more general background of the papers, we have decided that publishing them in electronic form is still the best solution – better late than never.

A large part of the papers have been reviewed and edited, but after the negative outcome of our discussions with the former publishers, the process was stopped. Since we wanted to get the CD-Rom edition out as quickly as possible, the remaining papers were only partly checked, but care was taken to put them into a reasonable form.