Virtual Reference Market Survey Now Available

Part of the grant was to report back on the 'readiness' or acceptance of such a service. Are the residents of Maricopa County ready for live chat reference services? In order to find out we decided on a survey on our home page. We will have this up for one month, but the link will stay live. We are inviting any library in the state to use the survey. The survey will be live until the end of the grant period. It is available in English and Spanish. Our awesome Web Developer, Tommie, constructed the survey in CF and it allows our branch staff to input the results of the in-person survey (taking place this week for 7 days). It also allows me to pull up the results at any time during the life of the survey. The survey hopes to find out the answers to questions like: would anyone use the service and, if so, what time would they use it. If they use it would it be for personal or business use and what topics would their questions most fall under.

You'll notice the last question is kind of an oddball. It asks:

Would you be interested in the following:
Accessing electronic books on the library web site
Downloading electronic books to read on a handheld device
Downloading audio books to listen to on a CD (in your car, or CD player)
Downloading audio books to a MP3 Player

Okay, so we are also trying to determine whether or not our customers are ready for ebooks and these questions will assist us in finding that out. If you are an AZ library please feel free to link to the survey. We'll share our results with you through the grant report.