Project Outcome for Academic Libraries - Peer Discussion Board

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Project Outcome helps academic libraries understand and share the impact of essential library services and programs. It is designed to give libraries simple tools and supportive resources to help turn better data into better libraries.

This community is for Project Outcome users at academic libraries to discuss their use of outcome measurement, ask each other about patron engagement strategies, and further the thoughts and conversations that begin with acrl.projectoutcome.org.
Here, you can find various threads to ask and answer questions, start your own conversations, or further your own learning about how libraries are using outcome measurement to improve their patron-focused programs and services.

  • 1.  data privacy/sharing

    Posted 28 days ago

    Greetings,

    We are considering implementing the instruction survey more widely (I am the only active user currently), but have concerns about the privacy of results between instruction librarians. As I understand it, all users can see each others' results within a library. How have other libraries dealt with this issue? I know this is cultural and might not be an issue at some libraries, but I am hoping someone has encountered this and come up with a solution that allows for data collection and reporting while allowing librarians control over their own data sharing.

    Thanks!



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    Kimberly Shotick
    Student Success Librarian
    Northern Illinois University
    She/Her/Hers,They/Them/Theirs
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  • 2.  RE: data privacy/sharing

    Posted 5 days ago

    Hi Kimberly-

    We have many librarian users including 4 instruction librarians, 1 special collections librarian, 1 makerspace manager and 3 law librarians.  We can all see each other's survey data if we wanted.  So to answer your question, no, we wouldn't have confidential survey results among PO users at our university.

    We actually like to combine all instruction survey data (from instruction, special collections and makerspace) together for power and and to demonstrate impact and value to our admin.  Of course instruction, special collections and makerspace also conduct workshops and other events where we'd use other kinds of survey too.

    Honestly, PO is a really terrible product.  We can spend hours just trying to upload and run reports.  Often bulky and broken.  I've been trying to upload survey results for the past hour and I'm just now taking a break and nothing is working for me. It wouldn't be worth our time to look at surveys specifically from individual librarians.  I now that isn't what you asked, but it is real and would inhibit that behavior.  We upload and run reports only on what is necessary.

    I would suggest, if you want privacy, to bulk upload your responses, run the report, then delete the survey.  You can always create a master-survey to keep and then create copies of it for uploading your responses, running the reports and downloading the analysis, then deleting the copy of the master-survey.

    We primarily do bulk uploads as we use paper surveys in classes.  We find that students almost always have 100% participation with paper surveys, and that we have almost 0% participation with a url or qr code.  Fortunately, many of our classes are under 24 students, so paper surveys are doable.  If you have a larger class, paper presents challenges.  If you have student workers who can transfer the paper surveys to an excel spreadsheet, that would help if it is too much work.  We often do this.

    Best, Jenni Bodley (she/her)

    Instruction Librarian
    Seattle University



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    Jennifer Bodley
    Adjunct Librarian
    Seattle University
    She/Her/Hers
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