To determine what kinds of services are appropriate and necessary for first‐year college students, it is useful to first understand how students acquire and use information during the beginning of their college lives. Questions based on the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education were used in interviews with students in order to better understand the kinds of information first‐year students at Virginia Tech needed, and how they acquired it during their first semester at college. Students were questioned about their information use during fall semester 2000, using both e‐mail questioning and face‐to‐face interviews. The data collected provided insights into how students acquire and use information, and resulted in suggestions that are being used in revising and improving library services for this population.

An increasing number of higher education institutions worldwide are requiring submission of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) by graduate students and are subsequently providing open access to these works in online repositories. Faculty advisors and graduate students are concerned that such unfettered access to their work could diminish future publishing opportunities. This study investigated social sciences, arts, and humanities journal editors’ and university press directors’ attitudes toward ETDs. The findings indicate that manuscripts that are revisions of openly accessible ETDs are always welcome for submission or considered on a case-by-case basis by 82.8 percent of journal editors and 53.7 percent of university press directors polled.

An increasing number of colleges and universities throughout the world are adopting electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) as either an option or a requirement for graduate degrees. This movement has resulted in questions about the role of these electronic documents in the world of scholarly communications and publishing. One specific question raised by students and their faculty advisors has been whether or not ETDs would be viewed as prior publications and would, as such, be ineligible for consideration for publication in traditional journals. This article presents survey findings that indicate that, while more study is needed, this concern appears to be largely unwarranted.

In 1994, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) Libraries founded a College Librarian Program. Begun with four librarians serving four colleges, it has since grown to include eleven librarians providing comprehensive library services to the six of Virginia Tech’s eight colleges not served by branch libraries. Other authors have described the early history of the program or outlined some of its specific elements.1 By reviewing how the program came to be, by analyzing the choice points it presents, especially from an administrative perspective, and by discussing its benefits and costs from a university point of view, the authors hope to illuminate an exciting and potentially beneficial approach that other large institutions might seek to adapt to their own missions.

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