Survey Design

Last week, in IST 613, Library Planning, Marketing, and Assessment, Prof David Lankes let us to conduct an informal research about collections in Bird Library. We were required to:

• Choose research question.
• Identify documents to be gathered.
• Talk to people, including librarians and students.
• Conduct observation.
• Identify other methods to gather data.

We went to the library at 7pm, the weather was snowy and stormy. Usually, at this time of the day, the library is packed with students. However, there were few students in the library, and even people from our class were more than students.

There was only one librarian on the first floor, so several groups went to the circulation desk to ask him questions and finally he got really annoyed. When Olivia went there and said:"Hi, my name is Olivia", the librarian looked at her and asked:"Are you from the library class?" and he kept silent, refused to answer more questions.

For the observation, we had been sitting there for 15 minutes and observing the circulation desk distantly. Total number of patrons went there was three, and one of them was Nichol from our group to get an ILL book.

Is it the common scenery in Bird everyday, every hour? Obviously not.

When we reviewed our last week experiences today, Prof. Lankes pointed out that he kind of intentionally let us conduct research in BLIZZARD. For there are factors affecting survey results. Very limited number of students in a night with bad weather, it was only the second week of the semester, etc.

The phenomenon is easy to understand but what is important is to take multiple related aspects into consideration while applying surveys to let the data be more accurate.