CAN Survey results 2009

CAN has been engaging in community consultation to establish the needs of its community and to help plan future outreach activities. Feedback from more than 300 respondents who filled out the CAN Outreach Survey has helped to shape the next year’s strategic plan. This blog post offers a brief summary of the survey report sent to the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. A full report can be found on the CAN website.

The CAN website is mainly used as a tool to find out what was happening in the sector. People are looking to CAN to create networking opportunities to facilitate learning. The search function was overwhelmingly the biggest issue with the site’s function. The CAN outreach online is widely used to retrieve relevant work-related information. The respondents to the CAN survey already use CAN website and outreach services and they want CAN to continue to provide training and to create networking opportunities to facilitate their learning.


The majority of respondents feel comfortable with technology but are limited in their ability to exploit it effectively, either through internet access issues or lack of skills. If the use of CAN outreach services was limited for respondents, it was because the respondents were not clear on the outreach services offers or because they were financially restricted.

Social media training is in the biggest demand. This response is noteworthy – given that these same respondents report that only 2% of their collections are online and digitised and there is a perceived low capacity within organisations to use these technologies. There is also significant interest in tutorials on how to photograph objects, digitise collections, use metadata, keywords and write catalogue descriptions.

Overall the satisfaction levels with the CAN website and outreach services is high. Demand for support also remains high, so sector needs and expectations persist. CAN is required to enable and further advance the collecting sector’s ability to make their collections available online.

A copy of the survey can be found on the CAN website. For more information about the survey results, email the CAN national project manager Ingrid Mason.

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