Main links:
The survey
Report on all results

Reports on results by response:
"Yes, develop a 'My UCSD Library'"
"No, don't develop a 'My UCSD Library'"

Report

The Libraries Website Committee received 116 responses to the "My UCSD Library" survey which ran from April 9 to April 29, 2002. The survey asked respondents about their websurfing habits, including their use of other customizable websites and the current UCSD Libraries site, and asked for their opinions on the idea of a user-customizable "My UCSD Library" tool. We also asked respondents about their status and affiliation with the University.

The overall response we received was very favorable to the idea. Three-quarters of the respondents said they think the Libraries should develop a "My UCSD Library" tool, while only six percent said that we should not [chart]. (The remainder of the respondents said that it "didn't matter" to them if we went ahead with this idea or not.) Half the respondents thought that they would use a custom page more frequently than they currently use the Libraries site [chart].

When it came to asking them which custom links they would like to see on a hypothetical "My UCSD Library" page, approximately 80 percent of respondents said they would like to see a search box for Roger, their favorite databases, and their favorite e-journals. Over 70 percent of them would also like to be able to search Melvyl directly from their page, and more than half would like an internet search engine as well. Many of them took the opportunity to suggest other features they would like on the page; access to their checkout record and renewing books was a frequent (and logical) suggestion.[chart and suggestions]

Faculty and graduate students, who we assume would be the heaviest users of custom library pages due to their ongoing research interests, were particularly enthusiastic about the idea. None of the ten faculty members who responded thought that creating user-customizable pages was a bad idea [chart], and almost 85 percent of the graduate student respondents thought that we should proceed with the "My UCSD Library" project [chart]. Both faculty and grads were more interested in custom lists of e-journals than the average respondent [charts: faculty, grads].

What does this all mean? Unfortunately, we can't pretend that this was a scientific study. While we were happy to receive over one hundred responses, this is only a tiny percentage of the people who used our site during the time of the survey. And it could reasonably be argued that people inclined to take the survey were the ones who were inclined to have positive feelings about the project in the first place. But the results do say that there is a reasonably high amount of interest in user-customizable pages among our most loyal website users (40 percent of the respondents said they use the site daily [chart]), and that would be interested in a combination of custom lists of resources and search tools at their fingertips.

[SL, May 22, 2002]