Our office distributed a survey with our newsletter that attempted to
determine whether faculty preferred to receive information from our
office in paper or electronic form.  We are presently mailing a two page
"policy information" newsletter along with information pertaining to
funding opportunities to all faculty on a monthly basis.  We asked if they
would prefer to receive these publications in the current form or receive
them in an electronic form via E-mail.    We also asked if they would like to
search for funding opportunities on the Internet (via SPIN) or were
interested in accessing information from our Web Page (we currently
make our newsletter, policy, forms, etc.  available on the Web).

Ten percent of the faculty responded.  The majority preferred paper
copies in all cases.  The following  is a breakdown of the results:

Newsletter
Paper  - 58%
Electronic - 34%
Neither - 8%

Funding Opportunities
Paper - 53%
Electronic - 34%
Neither - 13%

We decided to maintain our current procedure of distributing this
information in paper form but will make the information available
electronically to those who are interested.

The results of the other questions are as follows:
Are you interested in . . .?
SMARTS - 49%
Funding opps on the Net - 66%
Using DSRT Web page - 68%
Obtaining forms from Web - 17%

We give individual and group training for using SPIN, SMARTS, and the
Web, but receive minimal response.

We aren't sure whether the 90% who didn't respond to our survey are
interested in receving information from us in any form or just don't like (or
have time) to respond to surveys. [But could hazard a guess.]

We have concluded that our campus is not quite ready to make the leap
into the paperless office environment.  I would be happy to send a copy
of our one-page questionnaire to anyone that is interested.

Dawn B. Stein
Coordinator of Grants Information and Services
Division of Sponsored Research and Training
University of North Florida
xxxxxx@unf.edu
(904) 646-2455
(904) 646-2457 fax