During this period, BOS will experience two short breaks in service.

These breaks should be no longer than 20 minutes each. This will affect both respondent and administrative access to BOS.

We apologise in advance for any inconvenience caused.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at: bos-support@bristol.ac.uk

Tom joins us from Joint Informations Systems Committee (JISC), where he worked as the Office Manager for the central Bristol Executive office.

As part of this transition, we’ll be retiring the current email addresses: survey-help@bristol.ac.uk, survey-admin@bristol.ac.uk and replacing them with just one address, bos-support@bristol.ac.uk.

This new address should be used for contact with Bristol Online Surveys from the 1st December.

For a limited period after 1^st December, the current addresses will remain active and we’ll manually move your requests to the service desk and issue you with a reminder of the new address.

There are no other changes that you need to worry about.

Best regards,

The Bristol Online Surveys team.

The new 'BOS Templates: Advanced survey template' is a four-page template aimed at new BOS users and those wanting to see some examples of what a BOS survey can do. Surveys created from this template are completely editable, allowing you to explore some of BOS's more common features, and quickly adapt them for your own use.

The new 'BOS Templates: Simple survey template' is a minimalist, two-page survey that has been designed to provide more experienced users with a template to create basic surveys that can be quickly edited and supplemented with your own content.

All BOS users who have the right to create surveys will be able to select either of these templates from the list of those available when they create new surveys.

Research Fortnight reports that Principal Investigators attach more importance to, and are more confident in areas related to their research than they are in managing staff or carrying out staff development responsibilities.

Paula Shelley, senior human-resources adviser at the University Council for Educational Administration said that the data pointed to the need to be more explicit when setting out the responsibilities of Principal Investigators: "They don't become academics because they want to manage people... [so] it has to be there in black and white on the job description" she suggested.

However, Robin Mellors-Bourne, director of research at the Careers Research and Advisory Centre (who administer the CROS and PIRLS surveys) highlighted the data saying PI's shouldn't just be rewarded for their research outputs... There's more than one aspect of the job and there's immense value in the achievement of others."

Over 5,500 researchers from over 40 institutions took part in CROS, and over 2,500 from over 25 institutions took part in PIRLS which both ran nationally as benchmarked surveys.

For information about using BOS to run benchmarked, or large-scale national surveys, please contact us at bos-support@bristol.ac.uk.

The best advice we can offer at present is to try and create a short survey using your chosen language, and then pilot it to check that it works and that respondents can answer it. We suggest you author the survey in Firefox and not Internet Explorer as we know the latter can corrupt characters when being used with BOS. This issue only affects authoring (and not respondents) as far as we are aware.

Once you have created the survey you would need to check how characters are displayed in the questions/answers, how respondents would enter answers, and how the answers appear in the results. You should also check how the survey appears in different browsers and operating systems that your respondents might be using.

If you run surveys in more than one language with the intention of combining results, you should pilot these and ensure the data can be combined within BOS - if you make a mistake and launch the surveys then you won't be able to put it right and will not be able to combine the data from the different surveys.

The survey is at https://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/ilrt/bosfeedback

All questions are optional, although we hope that you will attempt to answer as many as possible.

By completing the survey, you also have the option to enter our prize draw to win an iPod Shuffle.

Thanks for helping us out!

The BOS team.

It is expected that there will be significant breaks in service during this time, which will affect the availability of the BOS service, both for survey editing and respondents. This work is outside of the control of the BOS team, so we can only apologise for any inconvenience caused by this upgrade to the University's core network infrastructure.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at:bos-support@bristol.ac.uk

This means that it's now possible to monitor responses without needing to log into BOS.

This is particularly useful if you use BOS for surveys that require you to respond (for example, surveys that log requests, or take bookings).

It is also useful for surveys that are only filled in from time to time (for example, long-term experimental journals), or surveys that can be closed after a required number of completions.

Email alerting can be set up to send an email when there are new surveys responses on either a daily or four-hourly basis.

It costs £100 per annum, and is then available on all surveys within your account.

For more information, please see our FAQ at http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/support/faq/can-i-receive-email-alerts

If you have the option enabled on your account, you can configure alerts as follows:

• From your 'My Surveys' page, select "Options" for your survey
• check (and if necessary change) the "Contact for survey queries"
• select the frequency for the alerts
• select "Save".

Once set (and assuming the survey is live), your survey will be checked for new responses at the frequency you've chosen (either daily, or every four hours - six times a day at the following times: 12:00 midnight, 4:00 am, 8:00 am, 12:00 midday, 4:00 pm, 8:00 pm).

If new responses have been received, an email will be sent. Emails will be sent to the survey contact - the survey contact can be changed under 'Options'.

If the same contact is set on many surveys then the email will contain details of all the surveys with new responses, rather than send a separate email for each survey.

If no new responses have been received since the survey was last checked then no email will be sent.