Archivists' Views of User-based Evaluation: Benefits, Barriers, and Requirements

This article reports on the second phase of a study concerned with developing standardized questionnaires for user-based evaluation for archives. Based on a review of current practices used by archivists to gather feedback and focus-group sessions held with archivists, this phase of the study concentrated on archivists' attitudes and concerns about user-based evaluations. It identified archivists' opinions about user-based evaluation of archives including the type of feedback they value, methods they currently employ to gather feedback from users, benefits and problems posed by conducting formal evaluation studies, and ways archivists would use standardized questionnaires for user-based evaluation if these tools were available. The paper also provides some recommendations to help archivists evaluate their services and systems.