On July 1, 1991, the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) Research Committee launched a pilot project to mentor academic librarians in their conduct of research. Since the mentors and protegees were potentially from all over the United States, the decision was made to mentor using the electronic conferencing capability of BITNET (Because It's Time NETwork). This paper discusses the features of BITNET and examines some projects that have utilized electronic mail/conferencing in education and other related fields in terms of how their experiences and conclusions might improve the use of electronic conferencing for another group. In addition to electronic mail/conferencing in research, the roles of the moderators and participants are examined in light of the experience gleaned from other projects. The paper concludes with a discussion of the electronic mentoring process in the ACRL pilot project and some examples of electronic mentoring are presented. (Author/MAB)