Book excerpt: Welcome to IWQOS'97 in New York City! Over the past several years, there has been a considerable amount of research within the field of Quality of Service (QOS). Much of that work has taken place within the context of QOS support for distributed multimedia systems, operating systems, transport subsystems, networks, devices and formal languages. The objective of the Fifth International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQOS) is to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners working in all facets of QOS research. While many workshops and conferences offer technical sessions on the topic QOS, none other than IWQOS, provide a single-track workshop dedicated to QOS research. The theme of IWQOS'97 is building QOS into distributed systems. Implicit in that theme is the notion that the QOS community should now focus on discussing results from actual implementations of their work. As QOS research moves from theory to practice, we are interested in gauging the impact of ideas discussed at previous workshops on development of actual systems. While we are interested in experimental results, IWQOS remains a forum for fresh and innovative ideas emerging in the field. As a result of this, authors were solicited to provide experimental research (long) papers and more speculative position (short) statements for consideration. We think we have a great invited and technical program lined up for you this year. The program reflects the Program Committees desire to hear about experiment results, controversial QOS subjects and retrospectives on where we are and where we are going.