Collections pre-survey

What issues are schools facing in resourcing the curriculum?

During 2013 SCIS has been conducting informal surveying of school library staff who attend workshops, asking them the free text question:
What are your current collection issues?

This survey closed at the end of Term 3 with a total of 85 respondents. The results were then coded, revealing what the researcher saw as 16 distinct issues.
While the frequency of each category being mentioned in a response is shown in the table below, the goal of the pre-survey was to collect a range of responses from which to prepare a more in-depth survey. The fact that respondents were attending a cataloguing professional learning activity at the time of completing this survey question, may well explain the high occurrence of ‘cataloguing’ as an issue.

What are your current collection issues survey responses
Collection issues survey responses. Sep 2013

 

Categories

  • cataloguing 14%
    catalogue records for resources are unavailable or unsatisfactory
  • e-resources 13%
    e-resources are not available,  or not managed or used appropriately
  • time 9%
    time to manage resources is limited and/or wasted
  • library system 7%
    system does not meet school’s needs
  • promotion 7%
    resources are not promoted to staff and students
  • budget 6%
    budget for resources is inadequate
  • staff 6%
    staff responsible for managing resources are not doing this effectively or do not exist
  • technology 6%
    technology required to use curriculum resources is not available and/or inadequate
  • search 5%
    finding what resources the school has, and where they are located, is difficult
  • weeding 5%
    weeding of resources does not occur regularly
  • access 4%
    access to resources is inadequate
  • age of collection 4%
    outdated resources are retained
  • balance 4%
    balance between print and digital resources is lacking
  • collection use 4%
    staff and students do not use school resources
  • OPAC use 3%
    staff and students do not use OPAC to find resources
  • professional learning 3%
    professional learning in resourcing the curriculum required

 What’s next?

You can contribute to the next stage of this research by responding to the survey at: www.surveymonkey.com/s/scisresearch.

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