TIDSR Survey on the Use of Digitised Resources

The attached Word and PDF files are a sample survey from the OII-JISC TIDSR project.  This survey was designed in late 2008 and administered in February and March of 2009.  It was an opportunistic survey (ie., not a random sample) gathered by announcing the survey to a number of relevant e-mail lists.

This survey was designed with several goals in mind.

1. To better understand the usage and impact of the five JISC phase 1 digitisation projects that were the focus of this study.
2. To understand more generally how humanities scholars are using digitised resources.
3. To collect additional data about collaboration habits using a similar structure to a 2008 survey aimed at social scientists (http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/microsites/oess/survey/), to be able to compare social science and humanities researchers using similar data.

Some notes on the survey design:

•  When awareness of the five projects is gauged in question 7, the specific resources we were interested in were embedded within a larger list of similar projects (many of which were also comparators for the webometrics discussed elsewhere in this toolkit).  This was done so as not to bias respondents in their selection of websites with which they were familiar.  After this large question, however, respondents were only asked followup questions on those projects among the five which they were either familiar or a regular user.
• It is imporant to test your survey, and have a fairly accurate idea of how long it will take respondents to complete.  If it is much longer than you have promised, you are likely to have a high dropout rate.  In this case, our estimate of 20 minutes was quite close to the actual rate among respondents (mean = 17.5 minutes, median = 13 minutes, 83% of respondents completed survey in less than 20 minutes).

The survey was fielded using a proprietary software package, DatStat Illume.  This package was chosen over other free or inexpensive options partly due to the complex skip patterns and conditional display options needed for this survey.  The complexity was due in part to the number of digitisation projects being examined simultaneously, and to the multiple purposes for the survey.  A survey designed to understand a single targeted resource could use a much simpler version of the instrument included here.

Please note that if you use all or part of this survey, you should cite it as follows:

Meyer, E.T., Madsen, C., Eccles, K. (2009).  TIDSR Survey on the Use of Digitised Resources.  Available online: http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/kb/27/tidsr-survey-use-digitised-resources

We would also like to request that you contribute your data back to this site when you have completed your study.