Balancing the Books: Emphasizing the Importance of Qualitative Evaluation for Understanding Electronic Information Services

Abstract

Evaluation in Library and Information Services has traditionally focused on quantitative measures of input and output. This trend has been generally reflected in the emerging efforts relating to the evaluation of electronic information services (EIS). Less well developed are qualitative approaches to evaluation of EIS. Issues that feature high on the agenda of the U.K. government are inclusion and learning; widening participation and lifelong learning cannot be effectively measured by quantitative data alone. The library sector needs to draw on the experiences of other disciplines in the use of mixed methods and user‐focused evaluation. Libraries often lack the skills and time to prioritize qualitative evaluation methods; however, the eVALUEd tool kit provides librarians with a range of tools to support them in undertaking person‐centered, qualitative evaluation of EIS.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.