Daily Archives: November 20, 2009

PACER Survey for Everyone

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Recently, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts  launched a PACER Online Satisfaction Survey. [PACER=Public Access to Court Electronic Records]

As the A.O. is trying to get feedback from PACER users, only individuals with a PACER account may take this survey.  (Question #2 on the survey asks for your PACER account information.  You are not able to skip past Question #2)

This made me wonder: 

  • Are there folks that might want to take this survey that aren’t holders of a PACER account?
    For example, our students in Advanced Legal Research get to see what PACER looks like, but don’t have an account.  Many folks who used PACER during the pilot program might also have comments but may not have an account.  Etc. 
  • Are there individuals with PACER accounts that would prefer not to provide their account information in the survey? 
    [You are unable to skip past Question 2 which asks for the account information.]  Although the survey claims to be completely confidential, there might be folks who would prefer to answer the survey anonymously.
  • What about organizations that share a single PACER account? 
    The survey is geared to a single response from each account holder.  There might be others, such as librarians in a firm or at a school, that want to each provide unique feedback.
  • There is another category of people who might want to take the survey — students who we log on.  Sometimes they are very heavy users (e.g., $ 500) and might have some very valuable feedback.

So, after thinking about those questions, we decided to copy the core questions from the PACER survey on the A.O. site and create a second, more-open survey.

This “PACER Survey for Everyone” does not ask you to provide a PACER account number (and it doesn’t ask you for your name, as is the case in optional Question #3 on the A.O. survey).    However, all of the other questions remain the same.

This survey allows anyone, users and non-users alike, to provide the simple feedback on PACER that the A.O. wants right now.

We plan to share the results of this survey with the A.O. so they can compare and analyze this other layer of feedback.  We hope that it is useful for all.  We also plan to post the results online here, too.