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The floppy disk drive is expected to become obsolete soon. However, this issue has been little addressed in library professional journals. This article reports the results of a Web‐based survey that aimed at ascertaining what plans, if any, librarians have for dealing with this technological change to retain effective library services. Our survey found that librarians, especially academic, care about portable data storage for their patrons but do not have any clear plans.

This paper aims to describe the development of the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) standard, and its applications and impact on libraries.

The information is based on a questionnaire survey conducted by the author. Inquiries were sent to members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Committee SU responsible for producing the SUSHI standard.

Four out of six members responded to the survey including Ted Fons from Innovative, Oliver Pesch from Ebsco, and Ted Koppel from Ex Libris. One member responded but did not want to be quoted.

Provides information on the development of a library aid.

The aim of this paper is to gauge how academic libraries treat publishing a blog.

As blogging becomes more popular, the question arises as to whether it should count as scholarship or a creative activity in academic promotion and tenure. To find out, the author sent a link to a questionnaire to several e‐mail lists, inviting academic librarians to answer a short survey.

In total, 73.9 percent of respondents indicated that their institution expects them to engage in scholarly activities and/or publish scholarly articles, 53.6 percent indicated that their performance review committees do not weigh a blog the same as an article published in a peer‐reviewed journal.

As technology changes, policies will need to change.

Libraries may need to adapt to new forms of scholarship. Electronic scholarship needs a mechanism for peer‐review.

The paper is original – the author did not find any other surveys regarding blogging as scholarship in the library literature.

The purpose of this paper is to gauge how university libraries are currently handling web policies as well as to see if the role of the library webmaster has evolved.

A survey was created and an invitation to participate was sent to various electronic discussion lists. Most of the questions were quantitative and were coded to find trends in the responses.

Most of the respondents either are reference librarians or webmasters, and they are mostly staff or faculty. As increasing numbers of resources become available electronically, university library web pages are going to continue to play an important role in academia. Survey responses indicate that most libraries (52 percent) have developed a web policy and 64 percent have formed a web advisory committee to maintain their web content. Responses also indicate the desire for further training in keeping up with the new technologies and the increased workload due to the time spent in maintaining web pages.

Actual policies could have been collected but it seemed beyond the scope of this paper.

Developing a policy or forming an advisory committee is desirable as technology becomes more sophisticated and content and resources are proliferating, as seen in the trends indicated by this survey. Therefore, the amount of the web work can be decentralized and should be shared by all parties involved in order to maintain and enhance the quality of the library's web site.

While there have been many articles written about the role of webmasters in libraries, there appear to be few that deal with the policies of the library itself in regard to creating content for the web. This paper would be useful to academic librarians dealing with web policies.

Librarians respond to staffing L‐net, Oregon's statewide reference chat service, in different ways. The aim of this paper is to create a survey to look for ways to improve the statewide service and improve the experience of chat librarians (as well as patrons).

The authors surveyed L‐net librarians to learn their thoughts and satisfaction with answering L‐net chat questions. They collected anonymous survey data via PSU's web survey software (Qualtrics). The survey instrument was a mixture of qualitative and quantitative questions. The survey consisted of 29 questions.

While the literature has many articles regarding patron satisfaction with chat reference, there is a dearth of articles regarding librarian satisfaction with chat. It was found that nearly a quarter of librarians said they did not answering chat questions on L‐net. A total of 76 percent indicated they had received written abuse. Swearing was the number one complaint at 28 percent, followed by sexual comments and rude remarks, which tied at 17 percent. One obvious problem seems to be the anonymity of the service and the way chat can serve as an outlet for youth learning boundaries.

While many studies have been done on patron satisfaction, few have studied librarian satisfaction in staffing virtual reference.

For a good part of the U.S. system of federalism municipal incorporation has been the formal structure for local communities. Over the last 60 years there has been a shift in this structure to special district government. The Woodlands, Texas presents an interesting case study on the incremental development of a former New Town community, the change in formal government organization and the potential for a different model of local governance structure in the 21st Century. The authors explore the four stages of development for The Woodlands over the past 40 years and assess this development through several model theories including institutional, urban regime, and urban governance. Contrary to some current literature on governance, The Woodlands appears to have transitioned from decentralization to more centralization while at the same time avoiding full incorporation as a municipality. It may be indicative of the new governance.