As a public library we are involved in regular surveys. Our service has to submit an annual survey to our State government, we run our own in-house surveys of our users and we also participate in phone surveys of users/non-users alongside several other regional library services. All this gives us a pretty good idea of who are users are and what they think of us.

However, you can never have enough information about your users or find out enough about potential users. So it has been very interesting, reading the results of 2 surveys out of the US.

The first is from the American Library Association, whose @ your library survey 1000 adults, nationwide on their atittudes towards public libraries. It surveyed what people thought of libraries and for those who used them, what they used them for. Interesting reading.

The second was a very comprehensive survey from OCLC, entitled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources. This survey examined information seeking habits and preferences of users of all sorts of libraries and included respondents from around the world, of which 535 were Australian. Its value was not only in the survey results, more so because of the Australian component, but also in the comments from survey respondents, which were interspersed as appropriate throughout the report.

Quite often the value of these reports is in hearing from the public – especially from those who don’t use the library. It helps give you an idea of why, which can then lead to ways in which your service can either offer new services to this market or better market existing ones, which would meet their needs.

Pew Internet is also a great resource for studies on usersof the Internet from a variety of perspectives – all which helps to build up a picture of our existing and potential users online.

We are an information organisation in an information society. We should be using this information to improve our services and continue to best serve our users and potential users well into the future.