The Gather Tool

The Web provides you with an easy way to collect information from many people. Whether you want to survey faculty members about their opinions on a particular topic, or conduct research with subjects all over the world, you can use web forms to gather the data so that you can analyze it. A commonly available CGI tool called FormMail can be used to transmit contents of a completed form to any email address. However, this typically only works well for small amounts of data.

The Gather tool was developed by Matthew Nocifore, Director of Networking and Systems at Haverford College, to work in a similar fashion to the FormMail tool, except that data submitted via Gather is stored in a database on a central server. This allows the data to be downloaded at any time and analyzed using a variety of statistical and data analysis packages.

This presentation (http://www.haverford.edu/acc/webdev/gather/gather.html) will show you how to use DreamWeaver to create web based surveys to utilize this tool, and how to extract the results of the surveys for analysis.