During 1997, the Colorado Library Marketing Council sponsored a series of workshops to develop the marketing and customer service skills of school library media specialists and to encourage them to adopt “internal locus of control”—i.e., to understand that the status of their positions can be attributed largely to factors under their own control. Recently, having allowed an interval of 6 months to elapse since the last in the series of workshops, the Library Research Service conducted a follow-up survey of participants to assess the impact of these events. Twenty out of 25 questionnaires were returned, for an 80 percent response rate. The accompanying table (see the full report) presents the results of that survey, including the number and percentage of participants marking each response.
Answers to most of the questions indicate that the workshops were highly successful:
- Virtually all of the responding participants (95 percent) indicate 1) that they are now more likely to attribute the status of their positions in their schools to factors they can control, 2) that they have integrated improved marketing and customer service skills into their jobs, and 3) that they have actually changed what they do based on their own market research projects.
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