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Are They Ready
to Make the Switch? |
Home Tables & Graphs [by Question] Summary of Findings Conclusions & Recommendations Bibliography The WSU Libraries Survey on Electronic and Print Collections was conducted in March 2003 by the Department of Collection Development. Two similar online survey instruments were created in FrontPage: 1) Faculty, Staff, and Graduate Assistant survey and 2) Student survey. (Some of the questions on the Faculty/Staff survey instrument were considered relevant to the teaching and research needs of Graduate Assistants so they were encouraged to fill out the Faculty survey instead of the general Student survey.) The survey forms were submitted to the University's Institutional Research Board for approval prior to distribution.
Links to both survey forms were posted on the WSU Libraries' main home page. PDF and HTML versions of each form were available to users. Signs were placed at all workstations in the library and emails were sent to all faculty and staff encouraging participation. During a two week period, there were were 381 surveys filled out by 174 faculty, 103 graduate students, 45 undergraduate students, 38 staff, and other. All forms were filled out online except for two. For detailed demographic information on the respondents, click here.
When the online survey forms were submitted by respondents, the responses were automatically posted to a text-file in FrontPage and to an email message to the departmental Administrative Specialist. The text file was converted to an Excel spreadsheet and the data sorted and distributed to subject librarians for use during the 2003 journals cancellation project. In the fall of 2004, the survey data was uploaded into SPSS 12.0 for Windows for more in-depth analysis. The resultant tables and figures were copied into FrontPage and a Web page created for the survey results at http://library.wichita.edu/colldev/onlinesurvey2003/index.htm.
- The WSU community is not ready for a blanket “switch” to electronic access. Overall, there is strong support for both print and online journals and print books, less for electronic books, among all user groups. However, the level of support for either electronic or print varies according to the academic status and major or discipline of the respondents. Users in some disciplines were more ready than others to make the switch from print to electronic. Any switch to electronic format should be “localized” according to discipline and user group.
- The relatively high number of “undecided” responses to several questions indicates that many users were unwilling to commit one way or the other to electronic or print access. An effort should be made in future surveys to focus on data that might help shed light on "undecided" responses to certain questions. Do those responses reflect problems with access or lack of exposure to materials in a particular format or simply an ambivalence toward losing materials in a "tried and true" format?
- With the increasing availability of electronic books and journals and the use of electronic materials by WSU faculty, staff, and students, preferences and usage patterns may change over time. Follow-up surveys on a biannual basis are recommended to track any changes in preferences regarding electronic and print resources among user groups. It is also important to increase the number of respondents -- especially among the student population -- to better assess the significance of the results.
- It is recommended that the next survey be conducted in Fall 2005. Click here for a proposed revision of the survey instrument.
- Results from this survey as well as future surveys will help assess the ongoing relevance and need of the WSU community for print and electronic collections and for the tools needed to locate and access those collections. Results from the 2003 survey have already been used by WSU librarians and departmental faculty to help make decisions about access to serial collections. Raw data was distributed to academic departments during the most recent serials cancellation project and was used to inform decisions to switch journal packages and individual titles from print to online only and/or to reduce book budgets to cover print subscriptions. Based partly on positive survey results, WSU Libraries recently implemented Infotrieve, an unmediated document delivery service, for faculty.
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