Thing 18- part 1

We love surveys around here, and considering our commitment to giving people what they want, I suppose we should. I think these surveys would be a great way to get feedback about our changes at the self-check in particular. We could assess people's knowledge of it and see how useful they think it really is. I would be interested to know how prevalent certain misconceptions are regarding the self-check, such as the idea that you have to be called down to use them or that you can't pick up holds there. I also feel like most people are still requiring a substantial amount of personal attention while using these machines, and I would love to find out how to liberate them a little bit more.

That being said, surveys have certain inherent problems that we'd have to watch out for. For one thing, it's very easy to write leading questions or only provide a limited number of answers. As a student, for example, I truly hate multiple-choice anything because they so frequently lack the choice I find most fitting; this would be an even easier trap to fall into if we're talking about opinions instead of "facts."

I also have some concerns about how we amateurs might analyze data. In certain cases, it makes perfect sense to just go with "Well, most people say X, so let's go with X." Sometimes statistics just don't work like that, though. For example, when we did the paper surveys about the self-check, a page brought up a good point: if we put the surveys next to the self-check, we only target the people who use or go near them. Sometimes data gets weighted one way or another for whatever reason, and our intuitions about how to interpret data can be pretty misleading. I have a vague sense of concern that all these cute tutorials and such will make us think we're experts in gathering and analyzing data.

Of course, this doesn't have to do with "Library 2.0" so much as surveys in general, so let's get back to the tech stuff. For one, I think these all look pretty easy to use (maybe deceptively so --see above comment on amateurs). There's actually not a whole lot to say there, because I think just about anyone could do this. I was surprised at how expensive the services are, but considering how precious feedback can be I guess it might make some sense.

By the way, I enjoyed Juanma's SurveyMonkey surveys about clerk stuff, and I think that was a good use of the tool.

I'll write up a survey and see if I can get anyone to take it, and I'll be back for part 2 after that.