El.pub Reader Survey Results
March 2002

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CONTENTS:
Methodology | 1. The survey | 2. Organisation activity (%) | 3. Country (%) | 4. EU funded project participant (%) | 5. Website visit frequency (%) | 6. Number of readers (%) | 7. Priority of sections (%) | 8. Effect of changes (%) | 9. Feedback (%) | 10. Overall (%) | 11. Other comments | 12. Conclusions

FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME - INTERACTIVE ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING
March 2002 El.pub survey results

INFORM project
Date: 19 April 2002

Methodology

A short questionnaire was mailed to the El.pub Weekly subscriber list in January 2002. A copy of the questionnaire is available for download as a zipped text file.

URL: download zipped email questionnaire http://www.elpub.org/quest4.zip

El.pub Survey 4 results

1. The survey

These results are for the survey of newsletter subscribers. In the third survey we had 145 responses (January 2001), second survey (April 2000) we had 124 responses (web and newsletter), and 93 in the first survey (May 1999). In this survey we have 139 replies (March 2002). The response rate is about 12%. Nearly half the respondents visit the web site at least once a week.

The survey was not carried on the web site as the previous survey had very few respondents via the web compared with the e-mail version. In that survey the two questionnaires were different. The result led us to the conclusion that previous entries from the web (first and second surveys) had been from newsletter readers.

URL: January 2001 Survey http://www.elpub.org/results3.htm
URL: April 2000 survey http://www.elpub.org/results2.htm
URL: May 1999 survey http://www.elpub.org/results.htm

2. Organisation activity (%)

What is the principal activity of the organisation you work for?

	March 2002	Jan 2001
Academic	27	19
Information industry	17	16
Publishing	15	11
Other commercial	14	14
Government	11	10
Computer industry	8	21
Entertainment industry	2	4
Broadcasting	1	2
Other	4	1

There has been a significant drop in the number of people describing themselves as from the computer industry, with more from the academic, publishing and information sectors.

3. Country (%)

Where are you now?

	March 2002	Jan 2001	April 2000
EU	75	75	70
North America	10	8	20
Other European	8	8	4
S America	1	-	-
Asia / Middle East	1	6	3
Pacific / Australasia	4	3	2
Africa	1	-	1

4. EU funded project participant (%)

Are you a participant in a European Commission funded R&D project?

	March 2002	Jan 2001
Yes	27	26
No	73	74

Are you a participant in a national or otherwise publicly funded R&D project?

	March 2002
Yes	37
No	63

This is the first time we asked about participation in non-EU programmes. Taken together with the previous question this shows that we reach more project researchers in total than we had thought. Analysing the two questions together we find that 46% of respondents are in a publicly funded research project, 18% are in both an EU and a national project, and 37% of non-EU respondents are in a national project. This is much better contact with researchers than implied by the 27% vs 73% split on just EU projects.

5. Website visit frequency (%)

How often do you visit the El.pub web site?

	March 2002	Jan 2001
Daily	2	4
Weekly	40	46
Monthly	26	30
Less than once a month	24	17
Never	8	4

6. Number of readers (%)

Are you the only person who sees this copy of thenewsletter or is it seen by several people?

	March 2002	Jan 2001
One	74	75
2-5	22	17
5+	4	8

7. Priority of sections (%)

The question asked people to rate sections of the content as high priority (H), update when possible (C), or drop, given the reduction of resources. Some people only rated some sections so we have added a non-response column.

	H	C	D	n
Weekly news	69	25	2	4
Event lists	24	55	14	7
Project info	32	56	8	4
Topic info	45	43	1	10
Analysis pages	38	39	17	6
Resource links and papers	47	37	9	7
Assoc links	10	52	25	13
E-journal links	34	45	13	8
Product links	17	43	32	8
Creative tech pages	24	45	21	10
VR pages	12	32	45	11
Ed publishing pages	30	44	19	6

8. Effect of changes (%)

Do you think the overall effect of the changes that have taken place so far has

Reduced value	10
Little effect	44
Improved value	38
Non-response	8

9. Feedback (%)

The question asked what the impact of requests for information on a two-monthly cycle would be.

Ignore	9
Reply if subject interesting	71
Leave service	1
Welcome chance to input views	17
Non-response	2

10. Overall (%)

The web site content is designed to cover the technical aspects of electronic publishing R&D rather than the market aspects. Do you think overall the site is

	March 2002	April 2000
Too technical	12	4
Too market oriented	4	6
About right	80	83
Non response	5	7

Although these figures are not very different they may reflect the shift in organisations shown in section 2 above.

11. Other comments

73% no comment, 14% positive but uninformative, 13% positive and informative.

12. Conclusions

The figures are similar to those in the past surveys. The level of support for the service remains high despite the changes that have taken place over the past few months.

There is some reason to believe that the figures reflect the specific views of the newsletter readers and that the web users may vary from this in part. The low score of the VR pages is not surprising as we publish a separate VR newsletter, which has its own devoted readers. Only a limited amount of VR news is published in both. Another low scorer, product links, seems to be of more interest to web readers as the product pages are one of the most popular entry points to the web site, probably from search engine hits.

Although news continues to be the prime interest of readers, the high demand for other information such as topic, project, and resource pages, continues despite the drop in resources currently available for updating these sections. The publishers will try to continue to keep these sections up-to-date at the expense of the other sections such as creative technology and events. The sections on associations and products will remain but not be actively extended.

We would like to thank all the people who took part in the survey, for helping us keep the site aligned with user requirements.

El.pub - Interactive Electronic Publishing R & D News and Resources
We welcome feedback and contributions to the information service, and proposals for subjects for the news service (mail to: webmasters@elpub.org)

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Last up-dated: 16 February 2024

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