At the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE) in November 1996 the Reverse Engineering Community proposed to merge several existing bibliographies on software reengineering. In spring 1997 the annotated bibliography compiled by Rainer Koschke at the University of Stuttgart was used as a starting point. In summer 1997 Chris Verhoef's annotated bibliography has been merged. All that work was carried out by volunteers.

Today, the bibliography is a frequently used repository for researchers and practicioners. There are more than 250 accesses a month. However, this success will only last if the bibliography is up-to-date. The volunteers cannot add all the references that exist. Therefore, we are asking authors to add their references to all their published contributions to the field. Since we cannot reach each author directly we are asking reverse engineering related conferences to inform authors of this bibliography. And of course, we also ask our readers to add references if they think an important paper is missing.

The classification of references offers a convenient way to search for papers that discuss a certain topic. Therefore, we very much like to have each paper classified. Of course, the author is the best expert to classify his or her papers.

Only in this way it is possible to keep such a valuable source of information up-to-date.