ABSTRACT

In the summer of 1997, I received a stipend from Eastern Oregon University to research Online Writing Labs (OWLs). Although listserv conversations, conference presentations, and informal discussions with other writing center directors provided some information, I waded into the netstream to survey OWLs. I sent a survey to various national listservs, including the two catering to members of the National Writing Centers Association (NWCA): wcenter (wcenter@ttacs6.ttu.edu) and owl-shop (owl-shop@bsu.edu). Also, I visited OWLs, particularly those accessible from the NWCA site run by Bruce Pegg at Colgate University (https://departments.colgate.edu/diw/NWCAOWLS.html), and then e-mailed the survey to the Webmasters of those OWLs. During the fall of 1997, I revisited many survey participants via e-mail and the telephone and reviewed OWL research in appropriate journals, such as The Writing Center Journal and Computers and Composition (see their World Wide Web site at https://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ccjrnl/toc.html). Finally, to gain a deeper perspective on OWLs, I traveled to a large university very interested in de-veloping an OWL and a small liberal-arts college uninterested in having an OWL.