[Koha] Perceptions 2009: An International Survey of Library Automation

[MJ Ray]

"Breeding, Marshall" <marshall.breeding at Vanderbilt.Edu>
> I have done all that I can to make the survey transparent as
> possible.  I don't think that you will find many other examples of
> surveys that provide the tools that I do to make the results
> available in the most open way reasonable.  I do not reveal the
> responses of the individual libraries, but can you point to any
> other survey that publishes data in a way that exposes responses in
> that way? [...]

I had this misunderstanding raised up about another library survey
that I commented on recently.  To be clear, I'm not asking for the
individual libraries' details or anything which identifies them, but it
would be better if the dataset (suitably anonymised) is published, so
that the conclusions can be verified.  As the sign by Dr Janacek's
office door used to say: In god we trust - all others must bring data.

The second aspect is for that dataset to be shared under some free and
open source software (FOSS) terms.  Whether a copyright and/or
database licence is required is down to local laws, I think, but
MIT/Expat and Open Database Licence seem to be suitable, among others.

There are lots of examples of surveys that publish the responses,
particularly government-run ones, but it seems to be unusual for
library surveys.  In the UK, http://www.data.gov.uk/ has recently
joined http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ to help index, track and analyse
all the datasets being generated by government.  Why are independent
library surveys lagging behind on publication?

So, I don't think having one website with a few tools is the most open
way reasonable.  Sharing them under an open license and uploading to
something like the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network would be
more open.

> In lib-web-cats each organization that provides Koha support can
> have the libraries with which they have contracts coded accordingly.

Can you give a quick guide as to how, please?  My test edit (soon
after the co-op was added as a vendor) has not appeared.

Moreover, when I ask to update a library, the vendor names appears to
be confused with the Automation System, which causes obvious problems
for libraries with automation systems supplied by multiple vendors.

[...]
> I hope that the survey provides some measure of library perceptions
> and attitudes toward their ILS products and organizations involved.
> This is the library's chance to have their voices heard.  It may not
> always be what the companies want to hear.

That seems a disappointingly divisive library-v-company view.
The Koha community includes libraries as much as they want, so maybe
this isn't a strong selling point of the survey for Koha libraries and
that's another reason for the surprisingly weak showing.  For a
couple of other discussions of this, see the recent KUDOS thread,
http://library-matters.blogspot.com/2010/01/users-vs-developers-not-in-my-universe.html
and http://www.web2learning.net/archives/3434

> I do appreciate your comments and the concerns you express.  I want
> this to be a survey that everyone believes is done in a fair and
> unbiased way.

I've no reason to believe it's not unbiased, but I don't think it's
particularly fair to ask people to share the basic data openly and
then not share the survey results as openly.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)  Webmaster and LMS developer at     | software
www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk        |  .... co
IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html |  .... op