Fred Rowland (librarian for Classics, Religion and Philosophy) in the RIS department conducted a survey recently on the format preferences for reading scholarly materials. Assessment Librarian Nancy Turner asks him about his project.
NT: What was your question?
FR: I was interested in how the faculty and graduate students in the departments of Classics, Religion and Philosophy were using e-books in their research work. I wanted to “take the temperature”. Did they have a preference for one format over the other and in what areas? Books? Journal Articles? Recreational reading?
I first considered conducting one-on-one interviews but decided to first conduct a survey to get “the lay of the land”. I have access to the email addresses, so I used that and sent a survey using Google Forms to 150 people. I felt I had a pretty good response rate, and got 49 replies right away. I never sent a reminder.
One of the hardest things was to write the questions. I’d never done a survey before. My interest was in reading habits for scholarly research material – so it was difficult for me to find a way to word this so that it was clear what I meant. So I asked how much time per week that was spent reading these formats might be interesting. I also asked if I could follow up with them in person. About 22 said yes.
I felt it was a pretty good “amateur” survey – I felt I got at what I wanted to know.
In addition to the preference question, I asked what department and status (graduate student or faculty) the responder was – I also separated out the journal article reading from the book reading.
NT: Tell us about your results
FR: I wasn’t too surprised by the results.
- 85% expressed a preference for printed books over e-books.
- A lesser percentage expressed a preference for print reading a journal article or recreational material.
- There was no significant difference between the preferences of graduate students and faculty.
I’ve shared the results of the survey with Brian (Head of Acquisitions). I don’t think I’ll be making any changes in how we purchase materials in my subject areas, but I feel more comfortable with the decisions we’re making. I’ve also shared the survey results with the academic departments.
NT: Is there anything you’d do differently?
FR: As I said, writing the questions was hard and I’d try to better articulate what I want to know before writing the survey questions. But I was curious about how faculty and students were responding to our increasingly electronic collection of books and I wanted to gauge their reaction to this change, particularly as it relates to their research work. I think this kind of activity demonstrates our interest in what they think. It helps me keep a pulse on what’s going on in my departments, and keeps the communication going.
For more information on Fred’s work, contact him at frowland@temple.edu.
Glad to hear about the survey. Just wanted to remind folks that we do have a subscription to SurveyMonkey. It is easy to use and has some nice features for both creating surveys and reviewing the data.
It might have been of interest to ask if the users – when they use ebooks – do so with the same behaviors they bring to print books. Do they read ebooks cover to cover or do they perceive them to be similar to journal databases. That is, they behave differently with ebooks in that they search them to find just the page or chapter with the information they need and have no intent to read it as they would a print book.
If they have different information behaviors with print and ebooks, we should not be surprised that they’d express a preference for print if what they have in mind is a traditional cover-to-cover reading experience. But if the questions were geared more towards search and retrieval for research – ebooks might then be perceived as a more effective research resource than a print book.
So perhaps the next survey could try to move beyond preferences to better understand how print and e-formats are used in the scholarly research process.
Fred’s work and Steven’s comment point to another issue related to surveys. While SurveyMonkey makes it easy to launch a survey, it’s really important to consider your questions. Nisa Bakkalbasi (Assessment Coordinator at Columbia) offered these suggestions at the recent ACRL Assessment Discussion Group meeting:
Principles for Question Wording
• Keep questions short and easy to read – 8th grade reading level is what to aim for
• Questions should be clear, specific and precise
• Ask only one question at a time
• Avoid or define any acronyms, jargon or abbreviations
• Construct questions objectively, eliminate leading language
If you need help, please let me know!