Survey software in libraries...the possibilities are limitless...

Survey software in Libraries…
the possibilities are limitless…

It happened so simply… A few years ago I was looking up something on an educational website, when a quick popup survey asked me one question. I loved the ease of it all and since we were in the midst of writing our self-study for accreditation, I made a note of the name Surveyanywhere http://surveyanywhere.com
and asked our Webmaster Librarian Leslie Tirapelle to investigate using it. We thought we might ask our students in our new computer labs (remember this was 2000) what they were doing…playing games, email, class assignments, etc. In a typical “can do, will do” style, Leslie had the popup survey working the next day and we started gathering “self-reported” data. Easy, quick and at a point of use.

Since that day, we have used Surveyanywhere for easy straight forward surveys:
• Pretests and post-tests for tutorials and orientation sessions
• Faculty surveys
• Class evaluations
• Program evaluations (ALA Let’s Talk about it book discussion series; employment surveys for the Library Technician program)
• Wireless survey (for students)
• CCL interest surveys (deans and directors’ meetings, topical surveys, etc.)
It is quick and compiles the data in a format that can be presented graphically or exported to a spreadsheet.

Then Surveymonkey came along… http://surveymonkey.com

The Library staff was frustrated with having just one style of question in a survey and Surveymonkey allowed a variety of styles (multiple choice, rating scales, open-ended text and others.) Layout could be customized and the design was much more flexible. Tracking of respondents was also available (and that is how I knew who did not respond to the digitization survey.) ;-(

The greatest thing about each of these is that they are reasonably priced AND you can try it free of charge (with a few limitations.)

Try it…you too will find the possibilities limitless…and the data is so valuable in this assessment and validation climate.

Recent surveys include:
Do you want to serve on an accreditation visiting team?
http://tinyurl.com/2b8hqq (Still open for Librarians to respond)

And one that I developed that expanded on Jon Fernald’s Hours Librarians Work : (to be run in the Fall)
http://tinyurl.com/ys3v47