An Overview of Meson-Nuclear Physics

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.