  This conference covers an extremely broad range of topics and in just a few
pages it is impossible to even touch on all the areas which will be discussed.
We have chosen to summarise just one area where there has recently been
impressive progress, namely our quantitative understanding of strangeness in
the nucleon. We also discuss a couple of examples where theoretical progress is
of direct importance for future experiments as well as for the interpretation
of hitherto anomalous results. Finally we make some remarks on meson and baryon
spectroscopy and the exciting array of new facilities that are coming on-line
in the near future.
