In response to a number of great suggestions and interesting examples, I have made some more changes to the logging library that I would like to make Boost-worthy. I still have some changes to make and am mulling over the way I would like to go about making them. At last posting, I had made a policy of the logging levels and they can now be user specified with my levels being the default (Thanks to Jason Hise for the suggestion). Since then, I have separated the management of a log from the log itself. the log itself is a very simple thing and implements whatever means of storage, display, etc. that it wishes (inspired by the suggestions and mantra example of Preston Elder). A couple examples I have created so far are a simple_log which keeps a list of entries for retrieval (by predicate for example), an ostream_log which immediately writes entries to a supplied ostream, a file_log which immediately writes entries into a file with a specified name. I have created these as examples but I don't see any reason why implementations for just about anything could not be created. I have implemented a callback system for log entries. A boost::function can be mapped to a logging level as a callback in case of an entry at the specified level. For example, this allows a user to catch what they consider to be a "fatal" error and act on it. (Thanks again to Preston Elder for the suggestion). I have implemented a means of converting from levels to string representations of those levels. This must also be carried out by the same policy class that defines the levels. It requires the implementation of a single, simple method in the class accepting a level and an ostream and writing the appropriate text into the ostream. I have implemented a means of customizing the format by which entries are written (Thanks to Preston Elder and Caleb Epstein for the suggestion). Again, it requires a policy class. This class must have a method that accepts an entry and writes it to a supplied stream. Of course, there is a null version for use in the case where you want to have specific logs do all the writing themselves. If you want to have custom formats for the entries, the only possibilities at this point are to log them all anonymously with a completely formatted message and use the text only entry writer or to implement some sort of logic in your logger/writer to distinquish the entries and format them accordingly. I am considering an ostream style message writing functionality as well. Something I plan to do but have not yet done is change from a char specific implementation (Thanks to Preston Elder for the suggestion) to one that's non-char specific. The code in it's current state is available for simple download from www.eng.buffalo.edu/~johneddy. It is not well Boost-ified yet but the directory structure is in place and some example files are available. Everything is implemented in header files at this point so no library need be built. There was a question of thread safety. The library is threadsafe if BOOST_LOGGING_THREADSAFE is defined. It currently depends on date_time and if thread safe, the thread library. Thanks for all your help, John