Assessing Research Compliance for Federally Funded Projects: The Good, the Bad, and the Publicly Accessible

In 2016, Utah State University launched a program to ensure their campus' federal grant recipients were in compliance with funder mandates to share any data or publications produced as a result of the award. This article discusses how a cross-institutional team of librarians and administrators evaluated the success of this program using online asynchronous focus groups (OAFG) in conjunction with a traditional survey. The challenges and successes of using OAFGs to assess library services are also examined. An OAFG gave participants greater convenience, flexibility, participation, and time to craft answers, eliminating some of the hurdles to traditional focus group participation.