[Taxacom] BHL Survey reminder (last call)

[Francisco Welter-Schultes]

Dear Taxacomers,

Last call for those who have not yet responded to the BHL Survey. The 
BHL Survey 2010 will be closed down at 03 May. 

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BHLsurvey

As already said in March, this survey is a key component in our 
continuing efforts to build a library which is responsive to and 
serves the needs of our user communities. Your responses and ideas 
are sincerely appreciated and vital to the further development of the 
BHL.

We thank all who helped improving our service by completing the 16 
questions of this survey since 16 March.

Preliminary evaluations suggest that we have been successful in 
informing most user groups, with some exceptions. Relatively weak 
response rates came unexpectedly from South America, France, eastern 
Europe and Russia. Scandinavia, Greece and Turkey were also 
surprisingly low. 

If you know some folks in these regions, we would be thankful if you
could inform them. We would like to listen to user voices from all
countries. 
This includes especially South America, a continent for which we feel 
a very special historical responsibility but being Europeans and 
North Americans we simply have no contacts to scientists working 
there. Current feedback from Latin America including Mexico is only 5 
% of the survey participants, we know that this is too low and does 
not represent their significance in biodiversity related sciences.

We also had very low responses from India, China and Japan, but 
this could have been anticipated since BHL is only available in 
Latin script.

The survey has 16 questions and will take 5-10 minutes to complete. 
We translated the questions into German, Italian, Spanish, French and 
Portuguese (and doing so we covered 87 % of the participants in 
terms of their native languages).

Some weeks after taking down the survey we will provide a weblink for 
the public where you can see the main results, as evaluated by the 
BHL and BHL-Europe team members.

Thank you for your time and for participation in the BHL Survey 2010.

Francisco



University of Goettingen, Germany
www.animalbase.org
www.bhl-europe.eu