October 24, 2018
Part 1 – The pre-launch work and learning One of the initial aims of the Advancing Library Visibility in Africa (ALVA) project is to collect basic data about libraries in multiple countries. Based off of our conversations and experiences working with partners, we had heard of or seen widespread gaps in information about public and…
January 22, 2015
New regional libraries have been introduced in Namibia. Officially called Regional Study & Resource Centers, the Government of Namibia, with support from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), has launched three of these libraries in different regions of Namibia. The MCC has commissioned TASCHA to conduct an ongoing performance evaluation of these centers. Over the past several months, TASCHA researchers have been developing and refining the project’s research design and evaluation methods (download the evaluation design report here). TASCHA will work closely with local research teams in Namibia to carry out the field research, which will begin in February 2015 and continue through 2017.
April 17, 2014
We recently launched a project that is looking at public internet access and use in Vietnam. One of the main objectives of the study is to understand the role library-like institutions, such as cultural post offices in Vietnam, play in providing public access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). Surveying public access venues, users, and non-users to gather data about public access in Vietnam is a critical component of the study. While critical to answering our research questions, collecting data on a large scale like in this project can be challenging. As such, we are excited to employ a different method of data collection in this study, using the Open Data Kit (ODK), developed here at the University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Using Android-based tablets, researchers in the field will implement the surveys and collect data through ODK.
