I’m running my first survey, so I feel like a real academic librarian now. Surveys are so ubiquitous in our field that I’m surprised I’ve managed to avoid doing one so far.

It has been an interesting process. To administer the survey, my college set me up with a Qualtrics account and an IRB application and let me loose. So far my experience has been positive. I have been able to set up the survey with Qualtrics without too much effort, and with very little googling for help. My impression is that there is no need to be a power user to use Qualtrics for basic purposes. A simple use case is easy to accommodate.

Anyhow, the IRB was mollified via the usual process, and I was able to start the survey. The responses are rolling in now and they seem useful. Qualtrics even has some basic analysis built in, which is fancy. The next hurdle for me will be making sense of this data in a way that fits into an academic paper. This will be new ground for me to cover too, so we’ll see how it goes.

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