Portfolio: Methods Showcase

Perhaps the most common use of surveys in the archival field is for customer/user satisfaction surveys. These are used to help improve services, gauge user bases, and for other administrative purposes (justifying budgets, existence, etc.).

• (2018). Beyond the Reference Interview: Assessing the Reading Room Experience. Archives*Records. Washington, D.C. https://archives2018.sched.com/event/ESmt/709-beyond-the-reference-interview-assessing-the-reading-room-experience
• Dryden, J. (2004). Do We Care What Users Want? Evaluating User Satisfaction and the LibQUAL+ Experience. Journal of Archival Organization, 2(4), 83-88. https://doi.org/10.1300/J201v02n04_06
• Joffrion, E., & Fernández, N. (2015). Collaborations between Tribal and Nontribal Organizations: Suggested Best Practices for Sharing Expertise, Cultural Resources, and Knowledge. The American Archivist, 78(1), 192-237. www.jstor.org/stable/43489614
• NARA (2016). Customer Satisfaction Survey. National Archives and Records Administration. https://www.archives.gov/dc-metro/washington/customer-satisfaction-survey.html

It is interesting to note that surveying is also used as a method for archivists to become more familiar with their unprocessed/backlogged collections, and sampling collections during a survey can follow similar methods (random, systematic, etc.).

• Pflug, W. (2016). “Assessing Archival Collections through Surveys.” The Reading Room, 2(1), 64-82. https://readingroom.lib.buffalo.edu/PDF/vol2-issue1/assessing-archival-collections-through-surveys.pdf  [This resource includes a survey about surveying in archives!]

One trustworthiness issue with surveys is that if questions are poorly written (which can be caused by a number of factors such as length, word choice, answer scale, etc.), the data gathered from them will not measure what the researcher is intending to measure (measurement error). This error can be reduced by working within the Response-Task framework. In general, assuring that surveys measure what researchers think they are measuring can also be improved by traingulating data, either through multiple surveys, other methods of data collection, or by having other researchers assess the survey data. In my profession, I can particularly see this being an issue for things like user satisfaction surveys, particuarly the timing of them, as well as the wording/answer choices (which could potentially push responses toward one end of the spectrum).

Another trustworthiness issue, especially for quantitative data gathered from surveys, is that it may not be generalizable to a larger population of interest. If generalizability is the goal, then probability sampling techniques can improve that. For my own practice, however, I don’t see generalizability as an ultimate goal—I’d rather understand each user/user group and their experiences. In this case, transferability and credibility would be more pressing needs for me, and they could be improved by member checks, triangulation, and transparency in methods and reporting.

As with most of the archival profession, I can see myself employing general user satisfaction surveys to find out more about our users, and I can also see surveys being useful to gain feedback from patrons about the arrangement of certain collections. Specifically, I’d love to see how patrons view the usefulness of minimally processed collections versus collections that have been more fully processed.

Depending on the context of my future archival work, I can also see surveys as a useful way to reach out to underrepresented groups of people and discover what they may be looking for in an archive, as well as how they feel about their representation within archival holdings.

Finally, after reading the Pflug piece (linked above in “Surveys in Archives”), I can see surveys as a really useful way to gauge how other archives are dealing with contemporary issues in the field.