Thing 17: Survey tools (i)

This post is an interim progress report.  I have, as Georgina bids us, applied for a Qualtrics account; I have made a survey using Google Forms while waiting for Qualtrics to arrive, and tweeted links to said survey.  Later, I will do a 'Thing 17: Survey tools (ii)' post, reporting on how I find Qualtrics and what answers, if any, my Google Forms survey has drawn.

The survey takes its cue from the 2017 Libraries at Cambridge conference. Registrants at the conference were invited to indicate what their superhero powers were, and a few did.  But the conference included much -- a panel discussion and a well-received keynote address -- on the theme of failure.  My survey asks respondents about superpowers they don't have.

Reading the posts of other '23 research things' participants has been most instructive, particularly Luther's notes about the limitations of surveying as a technique and the usefulness of other methods. He is quite right to note the ease with which spurious survey returns can be created; conversely, a toxic situation can be inflamed by insinuations that some survey returns are bogus, even if the insinuations have no basis in fact.  Luther's reference to 'grounded theory' took me on to unfamiliar territory, and I look forward to exploring this further.  Trying to relate it to my my own experience, I suppose it was something like grounded theorizing when I examined the free-text responses to a Haddon Library user survey, and when I asked library users informally why they thought a particular teaching session had had zero take-up.  In both cases I was trying to see if any patterns emerged.

Of these things, more when Qualtrics is in.  And any superpower survey responses.

Thing 19: Marketing

Or, in another word, everything. As Andy puts it in his instructions, marketing is "about how we position ourselves and what we do for our customers". That reminds me of the recent brown-bag lunch around Emma Woods' suggestions for how subject librarians could raise their profile. One of the comments, over the baguettes and fruit, was that these techniques for raising the subject librarian's profile were essentially techniques for being a good subject librarian. The steps, presented by Lori Reed, for devising a library marketing plan look almost like those for devising a wholesale library strategy. One imagines them as grist for several stakeholder meetings, rather than a single blog post.

Mercifully, the brief for this assignment pulls back from such an undertaking -- asks us to write "specifically about one tool or strategy you are going to adopt to promote your service". Mine would be Doodle, or some more elaborate surveying tool such as SurveyMonkey. They were not Cam23 discoveries for me -- SurveyMonkey surveys have informed discussions about Haddon Library funding and plans for a makeover -- but Cam23 has confirmed and enriched my view of them.

Finding out where people are, metaphorically speaking, and what they need, is not something that happens by magic. Assuming or pretending that one is of their company is an approach that has a way of turning squirmaceous. Survey tools enable one to ask the questions straight out.