University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Designing and Implementing a Career Retrospective Web-based Survey of Library and Information Science Graduates

Morgan, Jennifer Craft; Marshall, Joanne Gard; Marshall, Victor; Thompson, Cheryl

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/15355

Description

Title
Designing and Implementing a Career Retrospective Web-based Survey of Library and Information Science Graduates
Author(s)
  • Morgan, Jennifer Craft
  • Marshall, Joanne Gard
  • Marshall, Victor
  • Thompson, Cheryl
Issue Date
2009
Keyword(s)
  • Library and information science
  • Labor studies
  • Librarians -- Recruiting -- North Carolina
  • Librarians -- Job satisfaction -- North Carolina
  • Employee retention -- North Carolina
  • Social surveys -- North Carolina -- Methodology
Abstract
Over the last decade the library and information science (LIS) field has experienced an increasing concern with workforce issues, including the aging of the workforce, the lack of minority presence in the field, and the need for succession planning. Little systematic research has been done to characterize the exact nature of the problems and to develop data collection models that can be used to track the workforce on an ongoing basis. The Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science 1 (WILIS 1) project is a three-year research project designed to study the career patterns of graduates of library and information science (LIS) programs in North Carolina. The purpose of this paper is to describe the study design and methodology of the career retrospective study fielded by the WILIS study and to discuss the methodological lessons learned from this experience. The WILIS 1 career retrospective survey was fielded as a Web-based survey with complex skip patterns and achieved a 35 percent response rate. Topics for which lessons were learned include: the identification of effective strategies for updating graduate contact records, the relative efficacy of paper versus e-mail contacts in the survey recruitment process, the contributions of a nonresponse study to issues of generalizability, issues related to survey length, and the use of incentives.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/15355
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections

Library Trends 58 (2) Fall 2009: Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science PRIMARY
Library Trends 58 (2) Fall 2009: Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science. Edited by Joanne Gard Marshall, Paul Solomon and Susan Rathbun-Grubb.