Focus on Assessment - Aug 30, 2010

The Assessment and Metrics Council has been reviewing the comments from the LibQUAL+®
surveys done in 2002, 2004, and 2008. To get a sense of the topics or issues that are important to
survey respondents, we are using Wordle (www.wordle.net) to create word clouds of the
comments for each individual year. According to the Wordle website, word clouds “give greater
prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.”

When we created the first word cloud for the 2008 LibQUAL+® comments, the word “library”
was so large that it overshadowed the remainder of the cloud and prevented us from clearly
seeing how large the other words were in relation to one another. Therefore, we removed the
word “library” and created a second word cloud.

As you can see from the word cloud above, the most commonly used words (after “library”)
were “study”, “staff”, “students”, “work”, “resources”, “use”, “access”, “need”, “like”, “find”,
“help”, and “helpful”. Note that “XXX” was inserted into comments in place of profanity or a
specific University Libraries faculty/staff person’s name. We also corrected any obvious spelling
mistakes, as misspelled words would not be counted with the correctly-spelled words.

Using a visualization tool like a word cloud can help you identify major themes in a large set of
textual data (like survey comments) and clarify what issues are important to survey respondents.
Other uses of word clouds include textual analysis of catalog or website searches, SRTE
comment analysis, and keyword generation, as well as a multitude of teaching and advertising
applications. In addition, when we compare the word cloud for the 2008 LibQUAL+® comments
with those from the 2002 and 2004 surveys, we will be able to see how survey respondents’
issues and priorities have changed over the years.