Survey Says... part 1

I promised the results of the survey, and they are finally here. I have decided to divide it into two posts, one for the faculty survey and one for the student survey. I may do a little comparison as well. Overall, I have to say that the results are encouraging. I am going to have to dig through my files for the results from last year to see what changes there may have been.
First, the data:
24 respondents out of a staff of about 200. I realize this is probably not a representative sample. Generally, if someone takes the time to answer survey questions either they are a helpful person, they really like you, or they really don't like you.
Of the 24, 50% had actually visited the library for research. This was encouraging to me. I wish I could say that half of our entire staff had visited the library. The most frequently identified way that respondents had been helped by the library were being informed about new resources (70%), gathering resources for a unit (54%), and preparing a bookcart for checkout to classroom (50%). 75% said that their students liked to visit the library, and 75% said that the library website was helpful to their students. I also collected data on which parts of the library website staff members had used the most. The three most used parts of the website by faculty were Research Help, Reference links to outside sources, and Database links. All in all I found this informative and uplifting. It gives me areas for outreach--the BookSMART blog, and areas where I can see success--they are using the website, I remember last year most of them didn't even know we had one.

Now for the comments:
You have to have thick skin if you are going to leave a comment space, and so I tried to be odjective about reading them. Most were either positive or helpful. Sadly, the comments by the people who haven't done research in the library are telling. They were things like, doesn't apply to my subject, never occurred to me, and so on. This is another opportunity for outreach. The other place where the most comments were made was an open ended question that I put at the end of the survey. The question was "what suggestion would you make to improve WHS libary services?" Seven people responded. One said the library was not welcoming (ouch!), one said it was not enough like a High School/College Library, that it was too Middle Schoolish (ouch again!). One person had the idea of adding monthly cultural events. This idea sounded interesting to me, so that may be something that I will add. As far as being too middle schoolish, I am taking that one with a grain of salt. When I looked at this respondent's other answers, I discovered they had not been to the library, not used any of our services, not visited the website, etc. Therefore, I must conclude that they were not competent to answer that question, or to know what the atmosphere in the library is like. The other responses were generally postive and encouraging. There was just the one who said that the libary was not welcoming. This person also said that his/her students did not like visiting the library. I cannot discount this individual, as they had been to the library for research. I can only surmise that perhaps I failed this person in some way. I suppose you cannot please all of the people all of the time. I wish I knew more about what caused them to preceive the WHS library as unwelcoming.
So, there you have it, survey results, part one.