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British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography Survey Results

The British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography is moving from the Council of British Archaeology to the ADS in 2016. The idea is to integrate it with other ADS Library resources like the Library of Unpublished Fieldwork Reports (aka the Grey Literature Library).

The first step in this change was a user needs survey to investigate who is using BIAB in its current form and which other bibliographic tools the historic environment community are using in their research.

The survey comprised 10 questions and asked if the respondent had heard of BIAB, and if they had used BIAB. If they had used it they were asked some further questions about how and when they used it as well as what they most valued about it. Both users and non-users were asked what other bibliographic resources they used. They were also asked about their role within archaeology and the historic environment and which country they lived in. The survey was available for approximately one month over the end of July and August 2015. The response rate was impressive considering that this is traditionally a quiet time in the archaeological community. There were over 600 responses to the survey from a variety of  backgrounds. The following tables and images summarise the findings of the survey.

                             Main Role                                                                    Other Role

Image of a word cloud of the main roles of the survey respondents.
Figure 1: Representations of the Main roles of the survey respondents. The larger the text size of a role the more of respondents indicated it was their role.
Image of a word cloud of the other roles of the survey respondents.
Figure 2: Representations of the Other roles of the survey respondents. The larger the text size of a role the more of respondents indicated it was their role.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image of the survey results.

The full survey results can be downloaded here!