ITS is announcing a new Qualtrics Data Retention Policy, which we’ve been discussing with the departments that most heavily use Qualtrics through this summer. Essentially, we need to reduce our Qualtrics accounts to just those currently active at Swarthmore, with a one-year grace period. This includes deleting older accounts belonging to folks who have left the College, as well as the surveys “owned” by those accounts.

We’re forced to take this step by the new license terms that Qualtrics has imposed on us. We have to do this before any significant numbers of students create new Qualtrics accounts for classes or other purposes this Fall semester, which would push us over our new license limits.

Action Required

Please log into your Swarthmore Qualtrics account and check over any Collaborations and active surveys you’re involved with, including any surveys on your departmental or lab web sites, to make sure that any survey you want to keep using or preserve is “owned” in Qualtrics by you, or another current Swarthmore College employee, and not someone who has left the College!

How to check?

Checking who has collaborated with you in Qualtrics is easy – there are instructions in our Knowledge Base: How to check who has shared surveys with you as a collaborator. Once on the Projects page in Qualtrics, you can click on the name of any collaborator in your shared list to see which surveys that person has shared with you as a collaborator. You can also see the survey owner in the Owner column of the list of your surveys in your Projects page.

Long term

More generally, we hope that folks would be aware of which surveys are active under their supervision for data collection in their research or other projects, so this should be just a safety check.

Need help?

We’re happy to help with transferring older, active, or inactive surveys created by former colleagues and students at this time, but this is something that should be done more proactively by folks before someone departs from the College, moving forward. Individuals can always copy surveys from collaborators, if that permission is set, before the collaborator leaves Swarthmore, but this doesn’t transfer results or workflows. In general, we want to be careful about intellectual property protection, so we’d like to avoid transferring surveys except in extraordinary circumstances. Therefore it is best if faculty “own” the surveys used in their research projects, by creating them first and collaborating with their lab staff on the surveys to be developed and used in that work.

Timing

We will be disabling old user accounts and any surveys associated with them beginning on September 23rd, 2024. Please check, at your earliest convenience, whether there are any surveys you or your department uses that were created by folks who’ve left Swarthmore that you want to preserve for ongoing use, and make sure those surveys are not shared work you don’t “own” within Qualtrics.

Please share this with your colleagues. And if you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact ITS support.