You are young, strong and healthy, vibrant with ideas; still old enough as an Association to be well established, to be acknowledged as an invaluable forum for our professional development as well as an inexhaustible source for life-long friendships.

We hope that, within the coming years, you will grow even stronger, keep your attractive look and will inspire and empower the young generation of our profession.

We, the Public Health Information Special Interest Group of EAHIL (PHISIG),

are the youngest EAHIL subgroup: we came into being at the 9^th EAHIL Conference in Santander in September 2004 as WHO Documentation Centres Special Interest Group.

All the delegates of WHO Documentation Centres in Europe attending the Open WHO Information Session at the Conference agreed that there was a need to intensify networking and "formalize" the collaboration of WHO Documentation Centres with EAHIL.

In this way, our Group owes its origin to the informal network set up by the WHO Regional Office for Europe (WHO EURO) to get national support for the new WHO health information policy and strategy in Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall in October 1989. In fact, WHO Documentation Centres have featured many EAHIL Conferences and Workshops with special sessions and meetings organized informally in collaboration with WHO EURO and WHO Headquarters, especially since the "Covergence on London", the EAHIL London Conference 2000.

We were officially adopted by the EAHIL Board in January 2005, and we started with aims such as:

• Enhancing communication between the WHO Documentation Centres;

• Facilitating networking between the WHO DCs as well as WHO EURO and WHO HQ;

• Facilitating sharing experiences in managing WHO information.

However, in our second Open WHO Information Session and Business Meeting at the 10^th EAHIL Conference in Cluj in September 2006 when discussing the aims we realized that it would be more appropriate to extend the Group’s mission from solely concentrating on WHO. As a result, we were officially renamed as Public Health Information Special Interest Group by the EAHIL Board in February 2007.

Our mission, agreed by the representatives of WHO Headquarters, WHO EURO

and WHO Documentation Centres, encompasses aims such as:

• Promoting equitable access to public health information for all communities;

• Enhancing communication and facilitating networking between public health libraries and information centers;

• Facilitating the sharing of experiences and best practice in managing public health information;

• Developing networking and collaborative practices for the World Health Organization Documentation Centers in the WHO European Region, and facilitating communication between these centers and the World Health Organization;

• Working in collaboration with all organizations in Europe involved in public health information.

Public health librarians and information specialists, you can count on us,

the Public Health Information Special Interest Group of EAHIL (PHISIG). But we will also count on you: we depend on your commitment to make our mission into actions.

Join EAHIL, join our Public Health Information Special Interest Group of EAHIL (PHISIG) to work together for diverse public health information issues.

Together, we have an excellent capacity to work for challenging information issues for better health and also strengthen the WHO information network in Europe now and in the future.

On behalf of the Public Health Information Special Interest Group of EAHIL (PHISIG)

Päivi Pekkarinen Sue Thomas

The Group Coordinator The Group Secretary