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I would be interested to hear, particularly from academic libraries, how many of you create records for reference users on your library system, as opposed to simply keeping paper application forms. By reference users I include anyone from long-term members to day visitors. Our reason for doing this is chiefly statistical - information about who is using us on a reference basis can be retrieved in the same way as that for borrowers. However, in practice it has has proved to be a very time-consuming process, with large backlogs of forms developing. Part of the problem is that we are entering the information onto a template designed for borrowing tickets, making the act of inputting the information more time-consuming than it really should be. One way of overcoming this might be to set up a separate database for reference users - using, say, Access. I wonder if anyone else has done or is considering this? I'd also be interested to hear what information in general you keep about reference users (if any) Please reply directly to me and I'll summarise the replies for the list. Thanks, Pete Williams %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%