This conference covered recent developments, both experimental and theoretical, in the study of hadron spectroscopy. It focused primarily on the spectroscopy, properties, theories and models of: light-quark mesons, heavy-quark mesons and baryons, exotic states (glueballs and hybrid mesons), and future facilities for their continued study.Special features to note include: New results were presented on the ƒ0(1500) meson from the Crystal Barrel, OBELIX and GAMS collaborations, indicating that this state is now a clear candidate for the lowest 0++ glueball; The existence of the ξ(2230) was confirmed by new data from BES; A session on future facilities; New results on charmed mesons and on hadrons with b quarks were also presented.

Although perturbative QCD has progressed much in the last few years, the notion of diquarks is still useful and vital and many short cuts induced by diquarks can still be very efficient for simulating nonperturbative effects in the intermediate energy region (from a few GeV to some 10-20 GeV), where a whole new generation of machines is being planned and will, hopefully, become operative in the near future.

The 28th conference from the Rochester series was the major high energy physics conference in 1996. Volume one contains short reports on new theoretical and experimental results. Volume two consists of the review talks presented in the plenary sessions.