When I put the survey out, I hoped to get more responses than last time. Two years ago, I got somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 responses. I’ve been amazed to watch the number of responses grow and grow each day for the past two weeks. Right now, 750 people have filled out the survey; people from all areas of the field and all areas of the globe. It’s incredible! What I’ve found fascinating, is that from 350 responses until now, the results really haven’t changed much in terms of the percentages for each option. It makes me feel confident that a lot of these results can be generalized for the entire population (frankly, how many more libraryland bloggers can there be?!?!?). There are definitely some interesting results I’m seeing and I’m looking forward to doing more analysis than I could last time. Two years ago, Survey Monkey didn’t have any ways for people to filter the responses, but now there are all sorts of ways to looks at the data based on how people answered a specific question.. It’ll definitely take a bit of time for me to work the results, but hopefully we’ll all learn some things we didn’t know before. I’m going to write an article for Library Journal where I plan to go over some of the results, but there will definitely be a lot more detail on this blog.

Given how the responses are slowing down, I plan to leave the survey open for one more week, until 8/20.

I’ve been having really bad problems with headaches lately, so I’m not sure if this will affect how soon I can get the results out. They’ve gotten more severe and frequent than they’ve ever been and I’m trying to get to the bottom of it, but anyone who has dealt with the medical profession and headaches knows that it’s hard to find anyone who really wants to help you get to the bottom of things. While the pain is bad, the most frustrating part is just not being able to get through the gazillion things I need to complete. I just don’t have time to slow down and this is literally bringing me to a crawl.

I’ve gotten a lot of comments about what I should have done differently in terms of questions and options. Once people start answering the survey, I really can’t make changes. Once the survey is all finished, I plan to ask for feedback about how I could do it better next time and what new questions you’d like to see on there (or old ones you’d like not to see). For next year, I’ll make sure the survey better reflects what you all want it to be.