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5856 results in Facet Publishing

Page 184 of 293

  • 6 - Success criteria and impact indicators: how you know you are making a difference

  • from Part 2 - Evaluating Impact
  • David Streatfield, Sharon Markless
  • Book:
    Evaluating the Impact of Your Library
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 December 2012, pp 79-104

  • Summary

    This chapter guides you through stage two of your quest to evaluate impact: choosing success criteria and using them to write specific impact indicators. The key question at this stage is ‘How can I tell if I am making a difference?’ or, to put it another way, ‘What do I want to be judged on in relation to each of my service objectives?’ Designing indicators is one of the most critical steps in the whole process of evaluating impact.

    Let us start with two more traps for the unwary.

    When we talk about the elephant trap in section 5.4.4, this is because we have seen so many library service managers slide from writing objectives into listing what they expect to do to achieve them. We've come to the conclusion that this happens because the driving motivation for most library managers is to provide as wide a range of services as possible for everyone. Where this is feasible there is no problem, but when resource limitations kick in it is necessary to start asking questions about what works best.

    The same problem crops up at this stage, but with the subtle difference that people slide from ‘How can I tell if the service is making a difference’ to ‘How well are we doing this?’ As Linley and Usherwood (1998) say:

    Even where people have sought to assess the libraries’ performance against goals … the emphasis [is] on developing indicators of administrative effectiveness, that is of process.

    The second trap to beware of is that it is easy to slide into the problems of collecting the evidence needed to inform your indicators, rather than sorting out the indicators and then worrying about the evidence. This leads to library managers shying away from indicators that might be difficult to measure.

    Working through this chapter should help you to avoid these traps.

    Laws Of Impact Evaluation 4

    When you are thinking about what impact you would like to see, don't inhibit yourself by worrying about how you will gather the evidence – yet!

    Formulating success criteria: getting the balance right

    You should now be ready to translate your service objectives into success criteria. If you have written clear objectives, you should be able to answer the questions:

  • • What sort of changes am I looking for in the people that I want to reach with this service objective? or

  • 8 - Thinking about evidence

  • from Part 2 - Evaluating Impact
  • David Streatfield, Sharon Markless
  • Book:
    Evaluating the Impact of Your Library
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 December 2012, pp 113-126

  • Summary

    If you are working systematically through this section of the book, you have already done much of the main thinking that you need for evidence gathering. Assuming that you have thought clearly about what you are trying to achieve, how you can tell that changes are happening and what will tell you that the changes have happened, you are more than halfway to cracking the problem of gathering evidence. You now need to decide how much evidence to gather.

    Deciding your approach to gathering evidence

    When people are faced with the prospect of gathering evidence the first reaction is often to panic. How can busy practitioners do the work of professional researchers as well? The answer is that you don't have to. Effective impact evaluation involves careful focus on what is important and then gathering the minimum amount of evidence needed to tell you what you need to know. It should be reassuring to recognize that evidence is not a separate category of information; it is information chosen by someone and gathered for a particular purpose.

    The organizational context

    The same evidence-collection activities may work in one place and fail somewhere else. When choosing how to gather your evidence, you need to take account of the culture of your organization, current work pressures and how ready your staff are to get involved in this work. Some of the factors to consider are:

  • Other current or imminent evidence gathering elsewhere in the organization that may compete or conflict with your efforts. (For example, when a university library decides to conduct a survey of part-time and off-campus students it knows that services to these users are a big issue for the university. It suddenly becomes a bigger issue. The governors call for a survey and the central audit team jump straight in with a hurried and poorly designed effort. This produces little of worth, but the library team has to wait for several months for the dust to settle before doing its own survey.)

  • Timing: what are the best and worst times of day, week, month or year to engage with your target respondents?

  • Whether your target respondents favour or dislike particular evidence gathering methods. Have they been over-exposed to any particular methods (e.g. are they ‘allergic’ to questionnaires)?

  • 2 - Getting to grips with impact

  • from Part 1 - The Context
  • David Streatfield, Sharon Markless
  • Book:
    Evaluating the Impact of Your Library
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 December 2012, pp 23-32

  • Summary

    If you have decided to do some impact evaluation, or to try out the process, you may want to go straight on to Chapter 4. If you are interested in some of the difficulties inherent in evaluating impact and in gathering and interpreting evidence, read on.

    A metaphor and a model

    The language and underpinning concepts of performance measurement are often arcane and sometimes confusing. This is probably because the basic metaphor of performance indicators and targets and the associated vocabulary were developed by engineers when looking at system efficiency and appropriated by accountants to simplify and ‘measure’ the complex world of managing organizations.

    It is hardly surprising that the concepts of performance measurement work reasonably well when the library is considered as a more or less efficient operating system. Unfortunately for the accountants (often operating in their guise of management consultants), libraries do not exist simply to perform efficiently. The performance metaphor begins to break down when we look at what the service is trying to achieve and how well it is doing (or moving beyond easily measured ‘outputs’). In suggesting a way forward, we would like to stress that performance measurement based on system efficiency is important for libraries and should run alongside any work on evaluating impact. Efficiency is important – but so is effectiveness.

    Figure 2.1 outlines the traditional performance evaluation model. In this model, performance indicators are arrived at by looking successively at inputs, processes and outputs. Pursuing the engineering example, if you are in the business of manufacturing televisions, your inputs can be all the components that go together to make televisions. The processes will then be everything that you do in your production line to assemble the televisions. Your outputs are the completed and working televisions. In this model, if you want to look at the outcomes from the production process you can resort to aggregated outputs, by counting the total number of television sets produced (and probably also the proportion of these that work when switched on!).

    The engineering process model works reasonably well in complex organizations like libraries – but only up to a point. No amount of aggregation in library settings will usually tell you much about impact. Our next example shows where the problem lies.

  • 12 - Where do we go from here?

  • from Part 3 - The Bigger Picture
  • David Streatfield, Sharon Markless
  • Book:
    Evaluating the Impact of Your Library
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 December 2012, pp 207-220

  • Summary

    This chapter moves beyond the practical aspects of impact evaluation covered so far. It puts a toe in the water by introducing some issues and offers further sources to take up if you are interested in finding out more.

    What else do you need to think about if you want to take impact evaluation seriously? Evaluation can be too narrow, too shallow, too short term or undertaken too soon. We discuss these concerns below and then look at the scope for benchmarking around impact and at where all this work fits with the increasing emphasis on evidence-based library work.

    Getting impact evaluation right

    The process introduced in the main part of this book is intended to be practical and to meet the immediate impact evaluation needs of library service managers looking at accountability or seeking to develop their services (or to survive). To keep things as straightforward as possible, we have concentrated on evaluating the impact of parts of your service, especially those parts where you are trying to make a real difference to specific target groups of users or potential users. We have tried to take account of the unprecedented major change that is going on in the library world, especially in relation to electronic service provision and digital literacies, as well as the funding crisis occurring in many countries.

    Even so, there is a danger that impact evaluation carried out by service managers can miss important parts of the picture. In particular, there is a risk that impact evaluation can be too narrow in its focus (so that the big picture is missed), too shallow in its execution, too short term (getting instant feedback can be easy but may also be very misleading), and it may miss important change altogether if it is done too soon. How can we avoid these traps?

    Getting Beyond The Narrow Focus

    Social capital

    How can we look at the big questions about how libraries contribute to the cohesion and development of their communities or organizations? One way of exploring this theme is through the concept of social capital – defined as the stock of active connections among people in a community, or the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviours that bind the members of human networks and communities and make co-operative action possible (Cohen and Prusak, 2001).

  • 11 - Doing national or international evaluation

  • from Part 3 - The Bigger Picture
  • David Streatfield, Sharon Markless
  • Book:
    Evaluating the Impact of Your Library
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 December 2012, pp 183-206

  • Summary

    This chapter is aimed at people who are interested in evaluating libraries at national or international level. The issues covered, including changes in thinking about international development impact evaluation and about ethical evaluation, and current developments in evaluation of public access computing, may also interest other readers.

    Looking at the national and international picture

    In this chapter we try to draw out some of the lessons that we have learnt from our impact evaluation work in various countries, and especially our international work for the Global Libraries Initiative (GL) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). We have tried to be cautious in generalizing too far because no two international projects are alike but some of the impact evaluation issues are likely to recur in some form in any large-scale projects.

    (For more information about the Global Libraries Initiative see the note (1) to the introduction of this book. More information on the two IFLA work areas with which we have been involved, can be found in this note.)

    Negotiate the terminology

    Our international evaluation work has made one thing clear: the technical terms that we have suggested at the beginning of this book will not work across the board. We know from our involvement with impact specialists in different countries that some of the terms that we use, such as ‘impact’ and ‘advocacy’, do not readily translate into several East European languages (for instance Lithuanian or Romanian), at least if we wish to convey the same sense. Other terms, such as ‘assessment’, are used in particular and conflicting ways by different parts of the evaluation community (in UK education research, where assessment normally relates to student performance, versus US causation studies, where it denotes qualitative evaluation), and still others, such as the term for ‘evidence’ when referring to social science research evidence, has a different level of meaning in particular countries (such as Sweden – where it conveys the sense of legal proof). It is important to check out meanings of any potentially confusing evaluation words when working at international or national levels.

    Respond to the national impact challenge

    The world of library impact evaluation is changing, as politicians wrestle with the fall-out from the global economic crisis and every type of service is called into question.

  • Afterword: ‘Ownership is a flawed concept’

    • By Katy Wrathall, Katy Wrathall worked in IT for 15 years before undertaking the BA in Library and Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), where she attained First Class Honours and two Dun & Bradstreet Awards.
  • Edited by Jane Secker, Emma Coonan
  • Book:
    Rethinking Information Literacy
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 December 2012, pp 131-140

  • Summary

    Implementing the curriculum was the natural next phase after the creation and publication of ANCIL. The subsequent Arcadia Programme project, Strategies for Implementing ANCIL,1 had two separate but complementary strands, one a 12-week project examining methods of implementing ANCIL within the University of Cambridge, and the other a 10-week project investigating strategies within non-Cambridge higher education institutions (HEIs). The focus of this latter investigation of potential strategies within non-Cambridge HEIs was to identify existing provision of information literacy teaching and find out which members of staff are involved in the delivery.

    Information literacy has long been believed to be primarily the domain of academic librarians. In 1999 the SCONUL Information Skills Taskforce echoed Biddiscombe's (1999) assertion that ‘There are few academic library services that do not now regard the teaching of information skills as an important part of their mission’, arguing that:

    This is evident from recent trends of activity in this area of work, identified from data supplied by the Library and Information Statistics Unit at Loughborough University. The average number of hours spent by library staff providing orientation and post-orientation for students in SCONUL institutions has increased over the last six years from 13 hours to 22 (per 100 full time equivalent students).

    SCONUL (1999, 7)

    The SCONUL research revealed some variations, and showed that in new universities library staff spent more time teaching – increasing over the previous six years 1993–1999 from 22 to 28 hours – whereas the research-led universities tended to spend less time on teaching (the figures were 6 to 17 hours). The report concluded that, despite the variation in time spent, the trend was clearly increasing overall: the ‘number of users receiving orientation or post-orientation sessions is increasing overall from 36% to 46%, while appearing to be constant in the “new” universities at 60%’ (SCONUL, 1999, 7).

    Information literacy teaching has developed considerably since SCONUL first launched its Seven Pillars of Information Literacy. There is also a growing understanding that:

    Librarians alone can not provide an effective information literacy program for the entire student body on campus. When departmental faculty and librarians share the responsibility for the information literacy program, it can be implemented with a more coherent and systematic approach throughout the campus ….

  • Strand Ten - The social dimension of information

    • By Helen Webster, Dr Helen Webster researched and lectured in Modern Languages, with a DPhil and teaching profile in Medieval German Literature, until 2005.
  • Edited by Jane Secker, Emma Coonan
  • Book:
    Rethinking Information Literacy
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 December 2012, pp 119-130

  • Summary

    Strand Ten is perhaps the most transformational of all the strands as the learner evolves into a lifelong learner, developing a critical awareness of how their learning will continue beyond formal education. The strand supports the development of strategies for assimilating new information as well as information-handling, problem-solving and decision-making skills for the workplace and for the choices of daily life. Strand Ten also includes an understanding of the ethics and politics of information, so the learner develops strategies for assimilating and analysing information that might challenge their world view.

    We first met Helen through her work on the Transkills project at the University of Cambridge, which seeks to facilitate the transition of first-year undergraduates from their prior learning experiences to study at university. It quickly became clear that there were many parallels between our work and Helen's project, and her background as a learning developer also led to many fascinating conversations. Transition is an important theme throughout ANCIL, appearing not only in Strand One (Transition into higher education) but perhaps more importantly in this final strand, as the transition out of the academic environment into lifelong learning. Helen's experience as an academic and learning developer, as well as her subsequent Arcadia research from October to December 2012 to explore strategies for implementing ANCIL, make this case study to explore the final tenth strand particularly welcome.

    Background and institutional context

    As a new profession, learning development draws on and complements various other professions which offer teaching, coaching, guidance and advice on information literacy, from subject lecturing, counselling, careers and disability support, to librarianship (see Hilsdon, 2011, 13–27). Those working in learning development may be located in various institutional contexts under different job titles, and bring with them a variety of professional backgrounds and theoretical frameworks (Murray and Glass, 2011). Some are located in Student Services, others in libraries, others in faculties and departments, and all work closely with colleagues from these sectors across an institution. Much of my work as a learning developer has taken the form of one-to-one sessions, experience which has been invaluable in informing my workshop provision and resource development with a learner-centred perspective.

Evaluating the Impact of Your Library
  • David Streatfield, Sharon Markless
  • Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 December 2012
  • Assessing impact is increasingly critical to the survival of services: managers now require comprehensive information about effectiveness, especially in relation to users. Outlining a rigorously tested approach to library evaluation and offering practical tools and highly relevant examples, this book enables LIS managers to get to grips with the slippery concept of service impact and to address their own impact questions in their planning. The 2nd edition is fully updated to include international approaches to qualitative library evaluation, new international research, and current debates on the evolving nature of evaluation, as well as reflections on the importance of involving stakeholders and of evaluation to guide advocacy. This is an essential tool for practising library and information service managers and policy makers in the field. It will be equally relevant to LIS policy shapers and managers in public, education (schools, further and higher education), health and special libraries and information services working in any country or internationally. It will also be of interest to people engaged in professional education in the field as lecturers or students.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Jane Secker, Emma Coonan
  • Book:
    Rethinking Information Literacy
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 December 2012, pp xv-xxx

  • Summary

    We live in the age of information, where the physical, economic and social barriers that previously stemmed the flow of knowledge have been largely broken down by the internet and related technologies. This is the digital age, where computers and technologies are supremely powerful and the potential that they offer to human endeavour and particularly to education is great. However, in this world of digital information it is more critical than ever before to ensure that citizens of the world are information literate. People need the skills and values to enable them not just to access information but to use it to make informed judgements and choices, to make their voices heard and make a difference. Librarians have recognized this for many years and call these skills and values ‘information literacy’.

    Information-literate people are discerning in their choice of information sources and their use of knowledge. They are judicious citizens who can use information to transform their circumstances, create new knowledge and reach their full potential. There is a growing recognition that simply providing access to information through digital technology is not enough. There is a need to develop individuals with the ability to ask questions of the information they find and to evaluate sources critically. These abilities are recognized by UNESCO as human rights, fundamental to democracy (UNESCO, 2005) and they should be a goal for educators everywhere.

    Information literacy is particularly crucial for young people as they progress through school, further and higher education and into the place of work, but we also must ensure that everyone, whether retired or working, young or old, rich or poor, is equipped with these vital abilities. Educators are preparing children and young people for a world in which change is inevitable. Computing power has developed at such a speed that tasks that previously required large computers filling a room can now be undertaken using a device that fits in our pockets. It is a seemingly impossible task for teachers to prepare the child born in 2012 for careers and professions that they cannot imagine. Yet if the pace of technological development over the past 25 years continues, our need for an increasingly skilled and digitally literate population will only become more critical.

Rethinking Information Literacy
  • A Practical Framework for Supporting Learning
  • Edited by Jane Secker, Emma Coonan
  • Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    23 December 2012
  • A vision for the future of information literacy teaching Based on groundbreaking research, undertaken by the authors as part of the prestigious Arcadia Programme at Cambridge University, this presents a new and dynamic information literacy curriculum developed for the 21st century information professional. The curriculum adopts a broad definition of information literacy that encompasses social as well as academic environments and situates IL as a fundamental attribute of the discerning scholar and the informed citizen. It seeks to address in a modular, flexible and holistic way the developing information needs of students entering higher education over the next five years. Interweaving the authors' research and the reflections of internationally-recognised experts from the library, education and information literacy sectors, it will illustrate how and why this new curriculum will work in practice.

Page 184 of 293