During the last ten years great progress has been made in both fundamental and application-oriented research. Expanding knowledge of the physical properties in the superconducting as well as the normal state in preparing the way to an understanding of the underlying mechanisms. The accumulated experience in materials processing enables technical applications. All these aspects of high-Tc superconductivity and recent work on "traditional" superconductors have been exposed at the Beijing conference.

The present volume is a separate edition of part I of the extensive Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Materials and Mechanisms of Superconductivity - High Temperature Superconductors. It contains the plenary, tutorial and invited papers, and gives a comprehensive account of the state-of-the-art as of March 1997.