Library Surveys for Fun and Profit

At my library, we have a small leisure reading collection that we maintain in hopes of encouraging the students to read outside of class. My boss approached me at the beginning of the semester and asked if I could come up with some sort of survey that would help us determine what our students' reading habits are like and what exactly it is that they like to read in their free time.

I came up with a seven question survey asking questions like "How often do you read materials outside what is assigned for class?" and "What is the biggest factor that would prevent you from borrowing books from the library to read in your free time?" I kept it short, keeping everything on one page, knowing that the students would be less likely to even want to look at it if they felt like it was too long, asked too many questions, or had too many complicated questions.

Then I had to come up with a distribution method. I briefly considered just hosting it on one of our library's LibGuides or distributing it by email and hoping for responses. In both cases, the chances that anyone would actually find the link to the survey, then click it to get to the survey site, then actually take the entire survey were very slim. What students really need is something to motivate them to complete a task that otherwise doesn't really do anything for them (at least in the short term).

Then I came up with the crazy (as it seemed to me at the time) idea of standing in the commons area handing out candy to every person who completed a survey while wearing a "Librarian" t-shirt, geeky glasses, hawking my wares like a merchant by shouting "Seven questions! Five minutes! One piece of candy!" My supervisors loved the idea.

I bought a blank shirt from JoAnn Fabric and used fabric paint to print the "Librarian" on in a semblance of old typewriter font. Not my best work, but it got the point across.

So, I made myself a Librarian t-shirt. The Director picked up a few bags of Halloween candy in the post-holiday sales. And I emailed a facilities use request to the Facilities Director ("No set up required! My survey stand will be a book truck." Request easily approved.). I also, after much deliberation over what to put on it, made a sign advertising the library and my purpose. I wanted to get the point across without being too cheesy or stuffy. After bouncing some ideas off my supervisors, this is what we came up with:

Library name blurred out for semi-anonymity's sake.

 Of course, the word "candy" had to be written in the Candyland font.

The survey event went better than I had cautiously hoped. I decided to forgo the geeky glasses and annoying merchant persona, and instead I parked my book truck and approached each group of students in the commons with my survey, some golf pencils, and my bowl of candy so they could eye the goods before making their decision on whether or not to bother. I printed out 35 surveys at first, afraid to print too many, but I ended up having to leave my post and go print out more because I ran out of blank surveys before I ran out of candy. After an hour and four bags of candy, I had 68 completed surveys. Good enough at least for a start.

In tabulating the results, some of the responses were expected. Most of the students said that they read free-time material once a week or less. Magazines were the most-read format, followed by books. Most of the students said they liked to read about characters and settings that were either "similar to their own life situation" or "set in a world very different from ours." And most students said that they didn't check out free-time materials either because they don't have free time, or because they always forget to return the materials on time, and thus are afraid of borrowing. One anomaly in the responses that is weighing on my curiosity is the fact that when asked what types of materials they like to read, and prompted with "ex: books, magazines, newspapers, graphic novels or comics, blogs, etc." four students wrote both "books" and "novels" and one student wrote both "novels" and "trade paperbacks." Somehow genre and format are bleeding together, and it would almost be explainable if eReaders and eBooks are taken into consideration, but of those five students, none indicated that they own eReaders, though other students did.

Even if I can't puzzle out the genre/form anomaly to anything conclusive, the survey has given us a list of materials that the students are interested in seeing in the library, including two graphic novels that I had put purchase requests in for before I administered the survey, much to my satisfaction. And we now have a method of collecting more data if and when we decide that more is needed. My stunning, expertly designed and executed sign and t-shirt are going to be stored (the sign at the library, my t-shirt in my dresser drawer) for future library shenanigans.