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Showing posts from July, 2014

Collecting the Proper Data

My first week back from maternity leave and I'm already getting philosophical ... One of the big projects I was working on before my maternity leave was a patron survey on technology. The survey ran while I was on leave and we just got the reports back from the group that created the survey for us. And my reactions are so mixed ... On the one hand, it's great we were able to collect so much detailed data on our patrons' use of library technology. There's all sorts of fascinating data (such as 85.8%  of our patrons feel public library internet access is either important or very important to the community) that we can now easily share with the Board and other stakeholders. On the other hand, there's some pretty strong evidence that this was not a representative sample of our community and is likely missing representation from the heaviest users of library technology. While I love the level of detail of the data collected, it made the survey really  long. Colle