Tag: survey

Research Study: Archives in Libraries

Part of supporting scholarship is helping others with their research. When they arise, I’m going to start posting calls about surveys, studies, and the like that are designed with a research study in mind. I don’t know if/how these will be published, but supporting each other in these endeavors helps build a research and scholarship community.

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Good afternoon everyone,

I am developing a research proposal focused on the administrative dynamics surrounding archives that exist organizationally in libraries and the potential effects this parent-child relationship has on users. In particular, I am interested in talking with organizations that have reorganized the placement or structure of the archives unit within a library in the last 2 years. If you work in such an organization and are interested in participating in this study, please contact me at atodddiaz@towson.edu

Thank you in advance!

Ashley

Ashley Todd-Diaz, MSIS, MA, CA
Head of Special Collections and University Archives
Albert S. Cook Library
Towson University
Towson, Maryland

Research Survey: Historians and Subscription Primary Source Databases

Though this survey is directed to historians, they want participants regardless of AHA membership. This is a chance to help inform the AHA about access to primary sources relevant to historical scholarship.

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The AHA is investigating access to research databases and other resources used by historians. Independent and unaffiliated scholars, as well as historians at smaller institutions often do not have access to subscription materials necessary for their work. We would like you to answer a few questions that will help us determine what we can do to help scholars with this problem. We are looking for responses from anyone who considers themselves a historian, regardless of AHA membership status, so please pass this survey on to your colleagues. Your responses will be extremely helpful to the AHA’s efforts to promote historical education and research, and we thank you for taking the time to help us gather this important information.

This survey is brief and should take no more than 5-10 minutes to complete. Please respond by October 4, 2017 and do not hesitate to contact zjackson@historians.org if you have any further questions or comments.

The purpose of this survey is to allow the AHA to look into the extent of the problem of access to digital primary and secondary source databases for historical research. Many proprietary databases are only offered through university or other institutional subscription and are thus only available to scholars whose institution subscribes. This means that scholars without affiliations and those at places that do not subscribe to the resource they need are unable to access the materials they need.

When answering these questions please think only of subscription digital research collections (either primary or secondary source), such as JSTOR, Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Proquest Historical Newspapers, etc. Do not list or refer to materials that can be accessed for free. This brief questionnaire has a maximum of 9 questions and should take no more than 5-10 minutes to complete.

Please participate in NISO Publications Portfolio Survey

I received this email and while it’s not necessarily about scholarly publishing per se, I encourage anyone interested to participate. It’s great when publishers ask for input!

NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, is undertaking a substantive review of our publications portfolio to determine our best focus and attention in the future. To help us fully understand the broader impacts of the various standards, recommended practices, technical reports, white papers and other documents that NISO has published, we want include as much community input to this process as possible.

All community members are invited to participate in our publications portfolio survey athttps://www.surveymonkey.com/r/niso-portfolio. The survey will be open throughNovember 20.

NISO publishes several types of documents:
  • Standards: The most formal, “fixed” documents that NISO publishes, providing rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results. ANSI/NISO standards are approved by the American National Standards Institute and represent the highest form of stakeholder consensus.
  • Recommended Practices: “best practices” or “guidelines” for methods, materials, or practices in order to give guidance to the user. These documents usually represent a leading edge, exceptional model, or a proven industry practice.
  • Technical Reports: provide useful information about a particular topic, but do not make specific recommendations about practices to follow. They are thus “descriptive” rather than “prescriptive” in nature.
  • White Papers, Primers, etc.: contributed or solicited papers whose purpose is a call for action, a position paper, or an educational treatise on a specific issue.
Your input to this survey, which will solicit your knowledge and attitudes about our varied publications, sorted by type, would be gratefully received. More than one representative from an organization may fill it out, as we recognize that there may be various perspectives represented, and we appreciate these! We anticipate that it will take 20-25 minutes to fill out the survey. You may pause the survey and come back to it at a later time, if you are using the same computer and browser.

Thank you for your help. Please feel free to email any questions to nisohq@niso.org