1. What will ARL do for you? What will you do?
January 2005
Shrivenham, UK

2. Registration and Costs
2005 participation fee: $2,250 per survey implementation
Other potential costs include:
On-campus marketing and promotion
Travel costs
“Cost” of staff time on project
Registration runs throughout the year
The spring 2004 LibQUAL+ survey fee was $2,250 per library –a modest increase from 2003, reflecting the fact that we are no longer subsidized by the FIPSE grant.
There are incidental costs that your library may incur over the course of your survey. They include:
Advertising and marketing costs, to market the survey
Travel expenses for personnel who attend LibQUAL+ workshops
The expenditure of staff time on survey-related projects (such as writing articles, creating flyers announcing the survey, creating web pages, meeting with campus personnel, etc.)

3. Technology
Work with IT department to select addresses and compile mailing lists
Consider your hardware, software, and network connections
Prepare for any local network issues that could affect your survey
You should meet with your IT department to learn about your network infrastructure and discuss plans for the survey. Past iterations have shown that firewalls, proxy servers, and cache servers may disrupt the performance of the survey. You should know if these things are in place on your campus network – if so, you’ll need to know what your IT people can do to ensure that your survey performance will not be disrupted.
The survey form has been stripped down to basic programming components (i.e. no cookies, no Javascript) so that it is compatible with almost any combination of platform and operating system. To date, the survey has been successfully completed by hundreds of thousands of users, both in the U.S. and around the globe. However, you should still consider the possibility of local network issues that might affect your survey, and plan ahead.

4. Identify your sample groups (undergraduate, graduate, faculty, staff)
Determine your sample size
Sampling guidelines provided in Procedures Manual:
When identifying your sample groups, consider the desired outcomes and what information are you trying to obtain by participating in the survey?
(LibQUAL is not designed to give you comparative ranking data.)
Who do you want to get information from? Identify your sample groups (Undergraduates, Graduates, Faculty, University Staff, and Library Staff). Surveying library staff is optional – past iterations have shown that responses from library staff tend to skew the data. (We librarians are harder on ourselves than anyone else is!)
You may choose to use the recommended sample sizes for each group as provided in the Procedures Manual, but you are not required to limit yourselves. Depending on your institution size – especially if you are a small institution – you may want to survey your entire population. This has been done successfully in the past. A couple of things to consider if you decide to survey your entire population: survey fatigue and responding to your users.
If you are surveying your entire population, consider the long run. Do you want to run the survey again next year? If so, do you want to survey the same population? This survey is somewhat intense – will your survey population be willing to respond year after year? You are the best judges of your population’s performance. If you would like to run the survey every year, you might want to consider alternating your sample groups (surveying students one year and faculty the next) or you can pull two random samples of users and use one the first year and the second sample the next year.
The second consideration is the amount of time that may be spent on responding to your users during your survey launch. The bigger your sample size or population, the more feedback you will most likely receive. A generous rule of thumb is to consider that your survey liaison will have to respond to about 10% of your total sample.
You should also give some thought to users with vision impairments or other physical handicaps that may prevent them from taking the survey online. We make print versions of the survey available as PDFs (they’re in the survey Management Center for easy downloading), but you should be prepared to offer extra assistance to anyone who needs it.

5. Survey Liaisons Prepare for survey administration
Communicate with LibQUAL+™ team
Respond to user feedback
Work with local IT/academic computing contacts and ARL to resolve any local technical issues
Your LibQUAL+ survey liaison is the person at your institution who is primarily responsible for your survey. Typically, the responsibilities of the survey liaison have included:
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Prepare for survey administration
Includes informing the library staff about the survey and preparing them for it; staff members need to feel comfortable with assisting survey takers when approached, since they may get questions about the survey instrument and its purpose
Communications with the LibQUAL+ team
Generally, the LibQUAL+ team communicates with participants via – such as announcements to the list and individual inquiries from participants; however, we do also take phone calls and it’s often nice to put a voice with a name!
All registered libraries will have their liaisons/contacts automatically subscribed to the LibQUAL-L listserv. Your survey liaison should read all the messages on this list that originate from ARL and TAMU – we use the listserv to keep participants updated with the latest project information, any changes to the survey, and announcements regarding policies or procedures. We also use this tool to announce upcoming deadlines and events.
Respond to user feedback
Survey liaisons play a customer service role in the survey process when it comes to responding to feedback from users. Keep in mind that each bit of feedback you get during the survey run provides you with an opportunity to provide good customer service!
Feedback typically ranges from comments about the survey, to comments about technical problems users experience, to comments about the library itself
Survey liaisons also serve as critical points of contact during the survey process and a successful survey launch depends on their ability to coordinate the survey activities of their institution. You should ensure that your liaison is available during the entire run (for example, they shouldn’t schedule a vacation during the survey run!) and that they can dedicate whatever time is needed to its smooth operation.

6. Survey Communications
How will you promote your survey and communicate results?
Advertising/marketing
Survey Web sites
Flyers and other handouts
How will you create awareness of the project in your community?
Possible options include announcing the upcoming survey in the school newspaper, posting flyers across campus, announcing it in the library newsletter, attending faculty meetings or senate meetings spreading the word about the importance and significance of this project. Feel free to be creative with your public relations efforts. The more you make the survey visible on your campus, you can expect a better response from your users.
You should also give some thought to how you will communicate the survey results to your users. Once you’ve enlisted their aid, you need to share the results with them.

7. Survey Preferences Participants are asked to indicate/provide:
Support address
Language
Institution logo
Whether they want SPSS data files
Whether offering local incentive prizes
Dates of survey
Support addresses
When you complete the survey preferences page, you’ll be asked for a support address. This address will appear at the bottom of your survey web page, as a resource for users. You should determine who will handle these survey comments (usually the survey liaison), and how you will respond.
We recommend that instead of using a personal addresses, you create a generic address
You may want to create two “dummy” addresses:
For the library director when sending out the survey announcement, invitation and follow up messages, and
For the support person who will be responding to user feedback.
These two addresses will help keep your mailbox uncluttered while still providing a relevant address for your users.
Local incentive prizes
Institutions have distributed a wide range of prizes, including gift certificates (to the bookstore, for local vendors and restaurants, etc.), school-themed merchandise, even laptop computers and Palm handheld devices.
Dates of survey
You should use your academic calendar to determine the best time to launch your survey. Consider holidays, breaks, exams, and other campus events that would have a negative impact on your response rate. You should also consider personnel vacation time. You want to make sure that all critical personnel working with the survey are available throughout your survey.

8. Survey Customization Choose five additional questions (if desired)
Provide library branch information
Define disciplines for your institution
The survey customization page is new this year. It provides participants with three major options:
All institutions have the option to select five additional questions to use on their survey, in addition to the 22 core items. Participants will choose these questions from a pre-determined list – the list is composed of questions asked on earlier versions of the LibQUAL+ survey and questions used by participating consortia over the last several years. If you are participating through a consortium, your consortial group will select 5 questions for the group. You can choose to add either 5 questions, or none. You can’t add 2, or 4.
This year, for the first time, you will be able to determine what disciplines your users choose from when answering the demographics portion of the survey. We will provide a standard list of options. If you decide to add additional discipline categories, you will need to “map” those disciplines to our standard list so that we can analyze the data in a standardized way once the survey is over.
Finally, you can collect branch information from your users. Participants can add the question, “The library you use most often,” to their survey form – you will provide us with a list of options that people will select from when answering the question.

9. Preview Preview your survey, exactly as it will appear to users
Data entered in preview survey is not recorded
Clicking on “Approve” turns on your actual survey URL
You should preview your survey from a variety of different computers at different locations on campus. You can distribute the preview URL to others so that they can test it, too, but remember that data entered in the preview is NOT recorded and is not available to participants.

10. Representativeness Tell us about your institution:
User types (undergrad, graduate, faculty)
Number of users in each discipline
ARL statistical info. (number of volumes held, etc.)
Information will be used to determine representativeness of your sample

11. Monitor the Survey Track your survey’s progress in real-time
Number of surveys completed, day-by-day
Surveys completed by user group
Average completion time
Turn off survey when finished

12. Local Incentives
Provides list of randomly selected users for local incentive prizes
Available as soon as you turn off your survey run, or when survey closes to the public (whichever is first)

13. Post Hoc Questionnaire
Provide the ARL team with information about your survey run
Sample size
Number of s sent
Incentives offered
Marketing/promotion methods

14. Evaluation Survey
Your opportunity to provide feedback to the LibQUAL+™ team and evaluate your institution’s survey experience

15. Results Receive survey results data
Results notebooks (in PDF format) and Excel data files provided on a rolling basis
SPSS data files sent separately
User comments available throughout the survey period
Interactive statistics tool available online
ARL also provides list of local prize winners, if you offer an incentive prize

16. Online Administration System

17. Online Administration System

18. Online Administration System

19. Online Administration System

20. Online Administration System