Karl

Surveys and Focus Groups: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The eleventh annual October Conference for New England academic librarians,
sponsored by the Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries.

Friday, October 12, 2007
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

Surveys and Focus Groups: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The eleventh annual October Conference for New England academic librarians,
sponsored by the Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries.

Friday, October 12, 2007
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

We do surveys all the time. Are we doing them as well as we can? Can we be
even more effective? Our keynote speaker will cover appropriate uses of
surveys and focus groups, strategies for developing effective questions and
avoiding question bias, and tips for boosting response rates. We’re looking
for additional speakers to discuss their practical and innovative
applications of surveys, focus groups, and other information-gathering
techniques.
 
Have you successfully used a tool or technique to gather information? What
went well? What would you have changed? How did you apply the findings?
Here’s an opportunity to share your experience with your colleagues!
 
To submit a proposal for a presentation (15-45 minutes), please e-mail
[email protected] by Monday, April 30. The proposal should include
a brief description of your project and how long you’ll need for the
presentation.
 
We typically have 120 participants attend our October Conferences (please
see The Conference Page ); we
expect similar attendance this year.
 

Somebody writes: “Sure you could spend 5 weeks learning about some of the benefits of social software (blogs, wikis) within libraries, but who has that kind of time? This Lifehack.org post Right Tool Right Job- Social Media should take you about 5 seconds!

Basically: there are plenty of tools out there for lots of aspects of life. Let’s make sure we propose the proper tool (or our take on a good tool) for the right job. From managing our tasks and priorities to determining how best to engage our communities, let’s all start looking around for the right tools.

Of course if that’s not enough, you probably should go check out the About Five Weeks to a Social Library project that finished up last month.”

Somebody writes: I love this post by Michael Casey over at LibraryCrunch. He calls it “Passive Aggressive Behavior.” A librarian sent an email to an administrator I can only assume is really close to retirement, asking about the retention policy for a particular journal. She was told to go read the Retention Policy Manual.

Tulsa City-County Library Literacy Coordinator Jennifer Greb (a.k.a. Jenn2.0, webmistress of the Ambient Librarian wiki on Library2.0 topics) has been honored by Oklahoma Magazine as one of their “40 Under 40”. This is a list of 40 young movers and shakers around the state. Nice to see libraries getting that kind of forward-looking reputation!

digijen writes to tell us of a new restaurant on the south side of Pittsburgh called The Library.

“Executive chef Steve Harlow created an ‘American eclectic’ menu, which features creatively dubbed cuisine such as meat dish ‘The Slaughterhouse Five Minus Two,’ cheese plate ‘Of Mice and Men’ and a pasta entree named after Hunter S. Thompson.”

There’s a website which is just a nicely designed splash page at this point, but it looks like a fun place to be. Is ALA going to Pittsburgh any time soon?

[Update: I missed the link to the menu on my first viewing of the website.]

As noted at The Shifted Librarian, pundit parodist Stephen Colbert chose to trademark a random phrase during an interview with EFF lawyer John Perry Barlow. The phrase? “Librarians are hiding something.”

View the video at the Shifted link.

From a Project Gutenberg press release:

1/3 Million eBooks Free from July 4 Through August 4

1/3 of a million books, or 10 times the number found in the average public library, will be available for free downloading via the Internet and World Wide Web beginning July 4, as Project Gutenberg and the World eBook Library act on their dreams of increased world literacy and education.

Such a collection, if printed out in standard format, would be large enough to outweigh elephant herds and to cover the sidelines at all 40 Super Bowl games.

Each year for one month, The World eBook Library and Project Gutenberg will team up to be major sponsors, planning to make ONE MILLION eBooks available in the World eBook Fair of 2009.

From The Australian:

IN literary Australia, there’s reading, writing … and festival going. As author Frank Moorhouse reveals in Review today, the last has become a seriously big-budget item, with 46 writers festivals held each year in Australia.

Last year, about 285,000 event seats were filled at these festivals, an attendance rate that is increasing annually by up to 20 per cent. Admittedly this bums-on-seats measure includes people going to more than one session at a festival but, even so, it’s thought 90,000 individuals went to writers festivals in 2005.

This increasing popularity has led some to criticize the events as gathering places for anti-establishment liberals. In response, “one programmer jokes, ‘the Right is usually too busy making money and ruling the world to attend. The Left is much more inclined to want to change things.'”

CandiC writes: “OCLC promised to sift the Perceptions data from college students out into a new report and they’ve delivered with the College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources report.

Even if you’ve examined the original Perceptions report in detail, it’s worth checking the new report out because OCLC promises there are ‘all-new graphs and additional analysis of how college student data compare to that of total respondents.’

(via the It’s All Good Blog)”

From the AP via Yahoo!:

“Mr. Snicket believes that summertime is such a dangerous season, what with sunburn and melted ice cream and the possibility of summer camp, that it’s best to stay indoors and read,” said Snicket’s “representative,” Daniel Handler, who still denies the overwhelming evidence that he is in fact the author of the million-selling Snicket books, “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”