What do you want? Membership Survey 2011

You'll have seen by now the short and painless survey that's gone out on the UKCoRR discussion list, and if you're a member of UKCoRR I'd ask you to spend a couple of minutes filling it in. The survey comes about from discussions at the last couple of Committee meetings about the direction UKCoRR and indeed the position we should be taking. As Chair I've certain views on what that direction should be, but I firmly believe that it's important for such a small but close knit membership body such as ourselves to be steered as much as possible; and not just at the whims of your hard working Committee.

We continue to live in interesting times as repository managers and workers. The advent of CRISes and the REF have seen us go up the visibility flagpole in many institutions, but at the same time this visibility often seems to bring with it a restriction of movement; and it's always been the flexibility and adaptability of repositories that has been one of their strongest points.

I'll be nagging/reminding you all over the coming weeks to have your say!

Survey: Annual metrics collection for SCONUL & UK Repositories

As it happens my boss is chair of the SCONUL Chair of Performance Measures group and we've been talking about the SCONUL annual stats return. As many of you remember last year this tried to include repository download numbers for full-text items. I know from conversations I had with various people in the community that what they asked for wasn't realistically collectible, or at least wasn't last year.

However, SCONUL remains keen to be able to demonstrate what the UK repository community is delivering in their findings for 2011. She wanted to know if it was possible to isolate full-text downloads/accesses as discrete from total accesses, as she thinks the former is a more valuable figure.

For my own part I'm still not certain that I can create these figures for my local repository, or at least not without a lot of tech time investigating (something that with all the CRIS work we've got going on isn't really going to be an option). But what about the rest of the community?

Yes, that's right - this is a plea for information!

If you could take a minute or two to complete the following survey it would be very much appreciated and may help shape SCONUL's requests for this year into a more realistic metric! Which I'm sure we could all agree would be a positive move for the community.

The survey is here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PKQH6RC

If you're unable to access the Survey Monkey site please get in touch with me and I'll I'll email you a copy of the questions. I'll blog about the results this time next week - so get clicking and thanks

The results are in!

Earlier this month we set up a survey to find out what members would like UKCoRR to do. The survey has now closed.

Approximately a quarter (24%) of members responded to the survey and it is really encouraging to see this level of response given that this is a particularly busy time of the academic calendar with many people away at conferences.

The committee will be meeting to review the results next week and in particular to make plans for the next UKCoRR meeting where we will take advantage of the various venues and speakers offered by respondents to the survey.