Soliciting Comments and Feedback

Being in a somewhat lazy mood (how unusual!) towards the end of this rather long Monday (well, it was Monday, but I ran into a problem with Survey Monkey and, well there you go), I decided to take the easy way out and just cut-and-paste the assignment into my blog. In a blatant attempt to suck up to my instructors, I'll just say that I only steal from the best.

Assignment:

Part 1: If you haven’t already, change your blogger settings if you’d like to allow anyone to comment or to moderate comments. (See the step-by-step instructions in the reading above).

Way ahead of you. I originally tried it with the "moderate comments" option turned on so I could avoid automated SPAM comments. Then I realized that created more work for me since I would have to manually approve each comment, so I changed it to the word verification type that's supposed to prevent spammers.

Part 2: Post to your blog about this week’s topic. Some ideas: How could you use these feedback thingies for your library? What would you like to learn about them? What barriers do you see to doing this?

I'm already seeing blogs used for news and book reviews, with the occasional comments from patrons (but mostly from other staff members). I sort of like the idea of getting suggestions for the collection, but we already have a mechanism for that with our "Request for purchase" feature on our website.

Survey Monkey, which I've used in the past, has more potential. Like one of our readings said, people seem to like to share their opinions. MPL already has an opinion survey posted on our web site. I'm curious to see what sort of responses we're getting. I took the survey myself, and I thought it wouldn't generate much of a response-- it just seems kind of vapid. There's room for opinions, of course, but the questions seem like the type that will only be answered by people who love the library and use it all the time, or those who've used it recently and had a horrible experience.

Then there's the possibility that someone will respond inappropriately, or try to hijack the discussion to their own agenda. There's also the possibility that someone will stuff the ballot box, as it were, by making multiple comments. How do we prevent something like that from happening?

The biggest challenge, of course, is getting people to use it at all. There are lots of places that people can go on the web that are potentially more engaging than the library web page. What kind of local discussions about libraries and their materials do we provide that couldn't be gained from an established web site with an existing and broader audience?

End your post with an active invitation for other Project Play participants to comment on your posting.

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