At work we recently conducted a user survey of the students (the faculty and staff one will happen later). The response rate was low but acceptable. While I’m still pondering the results, it seems we got some useful information.
For example, I was rather surprised at the number of folks who said that they use the library for pleasure reading. Since we’re an academic library, I would have expected the “nevers” to outweigh the “mostly” and “sometimes” responses, but that wasn’t the case. This makes me feel a bit better about having recently pushed for us to pay more attention to the various literature awards. Our English department is big enough that we need to do this anyway, but that others might find such titles of interest is nice to know.
There were some strange things, too, of course. We had two questions about the service points at which users can receive assistance: one for comfort level, and one for satisfaction. For both questions there was a “have not asked” response option, but the numbers didn’t match. They’re lower under the comfort level question than they are for the satisfaction question. My guess is that people were marking their level of comfort with the possibility of asking a question, but maybe there’s some other explanation?
And then there were the comments. I never quite know what to do with comments, especially the suggestions. A very few — like the fact that the computer keyboards aren’t as clean as they could be — are easily addressed, but the majority — more computers, more periodicals, more books, open longer hours, comfy chairs — would take a good bit of money. Which we don’t have. But we asked, which means we need to act on these things somehow.
At least this was our survey (one person even commented on how nice and short it was!). Recently a survey went out to OU students that was about the library, but the library didn’t send it and the questions were either really awful or just plain weird. It was sent by the Public Opinion Learning Laboratory (though it isn’t listed in their current projects). I wish I’d printed the thing out so I could give examples.
Another one I wish I’d printed out came through my inbox the very next day, from two sociology professors who are interested in college students’ racial attitudes. Only the questions were so loaded that I skipped most of them and ended up wondering about the racial attitudes of the professors. Turns out that one of them teaches research methods, which has me a little worried.
Anyway, it seems that surveys are in the air as there’s been a discussion regarding them going on all morning on collib-L. Happily, there seems to be consensus that folks are willing to answer surveys from library school students. As long as they aren’t too long. Or annoying. Or poorly worded.
In class last night we talked a bit about the two surveys that were sent to the OU population, and Dr. Van Fleet ended by saying that doing a survey is easy. It’s doing one well that’s difficult and time-consuming. Despite the lengthy, sometimes hair-pulling, process we went through at work in order to create our survey, I’m very glad we did.