A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n
Feedback on ED's Internet-Based Services
Internet Working Group
Contact: Keith Stubbs kstubbs@inet.ed.gov
March 12, 1997
"Who uses ED's Online Library? How satisfied are they with it and ED's other Internet-based services?"
These questions and others were posted in a survey on the home page of ED's Online Library in November. The same survey was sent in December to 7,000+ EDInfo subscribers. More than 1,300 responses to the survey have been received and analyzed.[1] Highlights of that analysis are below. Background
ED's Online Library offers 20,000 files which, during January, were accessed more than 5 million times by well over 250,000 individuals from all states and more than 100 countries. During January, subscribership to EDInfo, ED's information service that provides three e-mail messages per week, surpassed 8,600 individuals and was growing at a rate of 100 subscribers per week. Highlights
The 15-question survey, which was posted in the Online Library and on EDInfo (November-December 1996) revealed answers to these questions.
1. Who visits ED's Online Library (web and gopher sites)?
Education administrators and managers are its top users (36%), followed by: teachers and professors (21%), researchers and analysts (16%), parents (4%), students (4%), librarians (3%), writers and reporters (2%), policy makers and legislators (2%), and miscellaneous others (13%) including counselors and consultants.
These users' organizational affiliations are elementary and secondary education (36%), colleges and universities (25%), associations and non-profit organizations (10%), state government (7%), junior and community colleges (5%), private individuals (3%), federal government (3%), local government (1%), media (1%), libraries (1%), and miscellaneous others (5%).
2. How often do they visit our Online Library (web and gopher sites)?
Nearly 73% of respondents visit ED's Web site at least once a month, while 41% visit it at least once a week. Only 25% visit ED's Gopher site at least once a month; 10% visit it at least once a week.
3. How useful is the information in the Online Library and EDInfo?
Respondents found most kinds of information offered by the Online Library and EDInfo to be useful or very useful -- an overall average of 2.43 on a scale of 1 to 3.
4. How satisfied are they with the information provided in the Online Library and EDInfo?
Overall satisfaction is high -- 3.98 on a 5-point scale. (5=very satisfied, 4=satisfied, 3=neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, 2=dissatisfied, and 1=very dissatisfied).
Out of 18 categories ...
- Clarity of writing received the highest rating (4.35).
- Accuracy (4.31), timeliness (4.25), overall usefulness (4.07), completeness/comprehensiveness (4.06), relevance to the respondent's needs (4.05), layout of material (4.05), clarity of the tables and charts (4.02).
- Clarity of graphics (3.82), amount of graphics (3.71)[2], finding information of interest (3.85), ease of finding new material (3.83), clarity of menus and categories (3.84)[3].
- Search tools: usefulness (3.76) and responsiveness (3.66).
The complete analysis of survey results -- which indicates what formats customers prefer, new services they would like to see, the best & worst comments ("rants and raves"), and more -- is available at: www.ed.gov/Survey/custmemo.html
Notes:
[1] Nearly three-fourths of the responses came from EDInfo subscribers.
[2] About half want more graphics, while the other half want less.
[3] These lower ratings reflect the difficulty of organizing a large body of information in a way that works for such a broad range of users.
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This page last modified June 12, 2003 (kms).
