The Information and Advice Team recently conducted a survey of subscribers to the weekly news bulletin they produce. They received 249 replies from a subscriber base of 3071. Roughly a quarter of the replies were from public libraries, quarter from Academic and the other half were from the school, commercial, law, not for profit and ‘other’ sectors.
We have summarised the main points:
- Most members felt the bulletin was the right length at 3-4 pages, so we are making a conscious effort not to make the bulletin too long.
- We will continue to cover all the subject areas we currently cover as the majority of users found them very useful or fairly useful.
- From January 2008 we will change the date you receive the bulletin to a Tuesday this means we will be able to cover Times Educational Supplement, The Times Higher Supplement and the Bookseller which often arrive on the Friday too late for the current Thursday deadline.
- The majority of members were happy to receive alerts to full text e journals that you have access to as CILIP members. We take on board the comments not to make the bulletin too long, but will be adding in highlighted articles. We will try to make these articles directly accessible by pdf and will include details on how you can search for other relevant articles on Emerald, JIS and JOLIS. We realise from your comments that the previous links we have included in the past often take you to the searchable database rather than the actual article.
- We will be researching web 2.0 capabilities and liaising with staff and members early in 2008 so that we can look into ways we can produce alerts for major news stories on the CILIP website.
We’d like to thank all of you who took part in the survey. We have posted a slightly fuller summary here.
Updated: 05 February 2008