Designing and Implementing a Career Retrospective Web-based Survey of Library and Information Science Graduates

Over the last decade the library and information science (LIS) field has experienced an increasing concern with workforce issues, including the aging of the workforce, the lack of minority presence in the field, and the need for succession planning. Little systematic research has been done to characterize the exact nature of the problems and to develop data collection models that can be used to track the workforce on an ongoing basis. The Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science 1 (WILIS 1) project is a three-year research project designed to study the career patterns of graduates of library and information science (LIS) programs in North Carolina. The purpose of this paper is to describe the study design and methodology of the career retrospective study fielded by the WILIS study and to discuss the methodological lessons learned from this experience. The WILIS 1 career retrospective survey was fielded as a Web-based survey with complex skip patterns and achieved a 35 percent response rate. Topics for which lessons were learned include: the identification of effective strategies for updating graduate contact records, the relative efficacy of paper versus e-mail contacts in the survey recruitment process, the contributions of a nonresponse study to issues of generalizability, issues related to survey length, and the use of incentives.