Papers in this e-book are selected from the excellent conference held in Hong Kong titled 'Academic Librarian; dinosaur or Phoenix?' The conference was organized by and held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in April 2007. The title of the conference was drawn from a paper written some years earlier by Colin Steele who was, at that time, the University Librarian at the Australian National University in Canberra. As the conference literature indicated: "…the basic premise: 'a library service and its future are only as assured as the people offering that service'. The conference will examine the challenges and opportunities faced by academic library personnel in an ever faster moving and constantly changing academic and technological working environment. The consolidation, growth, and even survival of libraries within and without our university communities and beyond will depend on decisions being made now about what a future physical/virtual library may look like.".