Blog Preservation Survey – Preliminary Results

Carolyn just got back from presenting our poster at JCDL in Vancouver and set up a blog sharing the preliminary results from the study, “Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation” [project website; survey invitation] that some of you participated in our study. You can have a look at them at “persistentblog.wordpress.com“. Note that the preliminary results include only descriptive analysis of the responses.  Anyway, I think they are quite useful and give you the big picture of what is going on.

The handout version of the poster is also available. However, I found if you print it on Letter or A4 paper, it is quite hard to read.

I would like to prompt you about interpreting and distributing these results. Firstly, the majority of our respondents tends to come from professional field, in particular information, library, and communication studies. As you can see in the Subject Areas section, the majority of respondents said they blog about professional interests, followed by technology. Interestingly enough, life and personal experience, usually the most written topic from other studies including a couple of Pew studies, become the third cited subject. In addition, we are also concerned about how highly educated our respondents are. 63% earned graduate and professional degree (beyond undergraduate).

This is mainly because of the limitation of snowball sampling technique, although we tried to get it out to the public as much as possible. Therefore, these results tend to reflect those who are conscious/concerned about preserving their own content. There are a couple of results that we think they are off-the-ground. Also as the number of bloggers keeps growing every minutes, it is hard to generalize the entire bloggers as our populations. In particular, we have only 215 valid responses which is considerably low. Therefore, if you want to make comment on any of these results, please note that these results could hardly imply to bloggers in general.

In addition, some descriptive figures could not be directly interpreted. They need additional contextual information. For instance, we could not summarize the money to invest in preserving blogs without geographical context because the value of blog based on currency could not be directly compared (e.g. $5 in the US is not culturally worth as $5 in Jamaica). We probably need to analyze the money investment by country, for example.

Additionally, we have received a number of valuable comments regarding how we ask and construct the questions which confused them. We do really appreciate all of your comments and we will take them into our consideration for the analysis and future work.

Note that this work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Therefore, feel free to share, copy, distribute, display this work not for commercial purposes. Please also link us back to the page, if you want to distribute.

We are still working on writing as journal articles to share our results and what we have learned from this project. When we finish the paper version, I will update to you folks again.

—–

จริง ๆ สำหรับคนไทย ตอนแรกผมคิดว่า ถ้ามีจำนวนคนตอบแบบสอบถามมาก ก็จะแยกออกมาวิเคราะห์ต่างหาก แต่พอเอาเข้าจริง มีคนไทยตอบแบบสอบถามเพียง 8 คน ก็เลยคิดว่า เอาไว้ก่อนดีกว่า ซึ่งผมก็เข้าใจดีว่า ทั้งตัวแบบสอบถามเอง และเทคนิคในการเก็บข้อมูลยังไม่เอื้ออำนวยเท่าไหร่ ทั้งนี้ผมวางแผนไว้ว่าจะทำ version สำหรับคนไทยไว้แล้ว เพียงแต่ว่ามันติดปัญหาเรื่อง IRB ที่ใช้เวลานาน ก็เลยต้องพักไว้ก่อน แต่ถ้าใครสนใจจะช่วยผมทำต่อ เฉพาะในเมืองไทย ก็ลองมาคุยกันได้นะครับ เพราะเครือข่ายของ blogger คนไทยเราน่าจะไม่ใหญ่เท่าคนชาติอื่น แล้วก็น่าจะเก็บได้ไม่ยาก หรือถ้าใครมี idea อะไรจะ share หรือนำเสนอก็ยินดีน้อมรับครับ