*** This survey has been concluded. Please contact Gary Geisler if you have any questions about it. ***

 

This User Needs Assessment Survey is being conducted by the Open Video Digital Library Toolkit (OVDLT) project to gather information that will help us understand the characteristics and needs of potential users of the Toolkit. The project is described more completely here.

20 Questions

In order to ensure that the Toolkit is designed to effectively serve the organizations that need it most, we have crafted 20 questions we feel will provide us with the clearest understanding of the actual needs of potential users of the Toolkit.

20 Minutes or Less

These 20 questions can be completed in as little as 20 minutes, but if you are able to provide more detailed responses, this will help us to build a better resource for you. Question 15 is actually a draft of our proposed metadata schema which enables you to provide specific feedback about how well the Toolkit would meet the unique information needs of your moving image collection and your users. We estimate this section will constitute 75% of the time required to complete the survey.

Survey Organization

The 20 questions are grouped into 5 categories:

1. You and Your Collection - This information will help us determine what type of organization (or individual) your needs and desires represent, and help us understand in more detail the videos that you might want to include in a digital video library.
2. Your Users - The more we know about the end users of your moving images, the more effectively we can design a system that will make them happy.
3. Tools - The Toolkit will include tools that will make creating a digital video library easier and that will give you information about the use of the library after it is operational. Information you provide in this section will help us design those tools.
4. Metadata schema - We have designed a preliminary metadata schema of the types of information that we feel would be important to record and display for each video to help your end users find relevant moving images in your collection. In this section of the survey you can tell us what elements (categories of information) you would use, which you wouldn't, and what might be missing.
5. Future Participation - In this section you can indicate any interest you might have in participating further in the development of the Toolkit. If you do have such an interest, this is where you can provide us with your contact information.

Anonymity or Collaboration

You can complete the survey anonymously. Survey responses are stored in a database but with the exception of the optional contact information you can provide at the end of the survey, none of the information stored is associated with a specific individual, computer, or IP address.

The Toolkit will be more useful to all, however, if we are able to identify people and organizations that are willing to actively collaborate in helping us determine the essential functionality of the Toolkit. We thus encourage you to submit your contact details at the end of the survey and indicate whether you are willing to participate in follow up interviews that will enable us to explore certain issues in depth. Your contact information will also enable us to keep you informed of the progress of the Toolkit and notify you of opportunities to participate in pilot tests of the Tookit and its accompanying tutorials and documentation.