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Hi Paula,
As ever it’s a question of context and risk and opens up
many of the underlying issues pertinent to the use of all cloud technology.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by ‘they wont be
able to get the survey back’. This will be the case if Google,
Survey Monkey or whoever happened to go out of business or be subject to some
other major change in service delivery and this certainly raises questions
about storing data on them for the long term, but on a day to day (or even year
to year) basis you will be able to get the data back that is stored there all
the while you have an active account with them.
It might also be worth saying that although the original data
might be stored in the cloud, most of these services offer the ability to
download the data locally for manipulation in excel. This spreadsheet
contains all the data held in Survey Monkey – thus giving you sufficient
local evidence of the process if this is required or felt safer. Having
this local copy of the data removes a great deal of the risk in terms of
relying on a 3rd party provider.
This question of risk will also depend largely on what your
users are using the technology for. Are these surveys largely operational
‘point in time’ exercises where their relevance and value is likely
to be reasonably short term, or are they capturing information of lasting,
historic value as this too will influence the best way forward and the question
of how suitable or not the technology might be.
Hope this helps
Cheers
Steve
Steve Bailey
Senior Adviser (Records Management)
JISC infoNet
Northumbria University
Room 303, Hadrian House
Higham Place,
Tel: 07092 302850
Fax: + 44 (0) 191 243 8469
Web: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk
Blog: http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com/
Linkedin profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/sjbailey
Twitter ID: @sjbailey
From: The UK Records Management mailing list
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of McCLURE Paula
Mello
Sent: 17 September 2009 15:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: question about online surveys
I
have a question I'd like to pose to the group about online surveys. What do you
think about users creating surveys using Google Docs or Survey Monkey, and
having these tabulate the results for them?
From
a records perspective, they won't be able to get the survey back, because it is
hosted on Google Docs. They will only have the printouts of the survey and the
results. They won't have custody of the record, though, the survey that they
created. Have you come across this and is it a problem?
Thank
you,
Paula
McClure
Records
Manager/Archivist
For any technical queries re JISC please email
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