The 2006 ESO Science Archive Survey

This page contains the full results from the 2006 ESO Science Archive survey carried out by the Virtual Observatory Systems Department of the ESO Data Management and Operations Division.
The online questionnaire was issued on March 1st 2006, ran for one month and was returned by 558 participants.
We would like to thank all ESO Archive users and respondents of the present survey for their time and valuable comments!

This survey is the subject of a recent article in the September 2006 issue of the ESO Messenger, the quarterly journal presenting ESO's activities to the public.

- Which part(s) of the ESO/ST-ECF Archive do you use?
archive_use

- Are you PI/CoI of some ESO observing programme(s)?
pi_coi

- What is your affiliation?

- What is your professional status?
professional_status

- What are your reasons for using the ESO Archive?
reason

- How frequently do you use the ESO Archive?
archive_frequency

- Which of the following ESO Archive services do you use?
archive_services

- What is your level of satisfaction with the following items? How would you rate the overall quality of the ESO Archive?
archive_satisfaction

- Which new features would you like to see in the ESO Science Archive interface?
new_features

- If you published papers based on ESO archival data, please specify in which context:
publications

- If you published papers based on ESO archival data for which you were not PI/CoI, please specify the nature of the data:

Given that the ESO archive contains more than 3,000 raw data sets and around 100 high-level data sets, the survey responses (Figure on the left side) were weighted to better reflect the science productivity based on either raw data or high-level data products. Thus a high-level data set is approximately 15 times more likely to lead to a scientific publication than a raw data set (Figure on the right side).
High-level data sets: VOS/ADP + EIS + Science Verification + Commissioning

- If you failed to publish papers based on ESO archival data, please specify why:
failure_publish

- Do you believe you are sufficiently kept informed about what's new in the ESO Archive?
enough_news

- In which ways do you think the ESO Archive should provide news?
archive_news

- Comments/Suggestions/Problems:

Archive web / Query interfaces related (75 inputs)
Science related (48 inputs)
Operations related (34 inputs)
Miscellaneous
- more mediatisation, exercises for teachers