Accounting for Outcomes: Demonstrating the Impact of Public Libraries

Abstract

The roles of the researcher and marketer are different but both benefit from the qualitative assessment of the outcomes of public library services. Qualitative research dam derived from social audit techniques provide images that can be used to demonstrate the value and impact of providing library services. Research at the University of Sheffield suggests that libraries have an important role to play in terms of personal development; social cohesion; community empowerment; local culture and identity; imagination and creativity; health and well being. These are important messages to be communicated to policy makers and other stakeholders. Edited version of a paper given at the Alia public libraries conference Melbourne 12-15 November 2001 ********** At a time when so much emphasis is being placed on quality, standards, and accountability, it should not come as a surprise that the academic world is spending time devising new ways of assessing the value and impact of organisations. At the same time, those responsible for managing and marketing library services are having to demonstrate their value to the public, policy makers and other stakeholders. However serious difficulties can arise for researchers and practitioners alike if they try to deal with these issues using inappropriate tools. For example tools used to demonstrate outputs may not be the same as those used to demonstrate outcomes. For a number of years we had been considering social audit techniques as a way of evaluating library services. We were influenced by the approach to social auditing developed by the New Economics Foundation, and based on Zadek's idea that the stakeholders in an organisation have the right to be heard. This, says David Boyle (1) in his splendid book The tyranny of numbers, `gives social audits a kind of objectivity which simple market research doesn't have'. We discussed these ideas with a number of practitioners and thanks to the support of what was then the British Library Research and Innovation Centre, we were able to undertake social audits of library services in Somerset, a rural county in the south, and Newcastle, a large city in the north, of England. In doing this the aims were to determine how far ideas about libraries are reflected in practice, and to ascertain the degree to which social aspirations are translated into positive achievements. The intention was to provide a framework to enable professionals and policy makers to come to an informed judgement about the value and impact of public library organisations. Value and impact studies are much more than mere measurement. Statistics are just a small part of the reality of the library, and any meaningful demonstration of its value has to go beyond simplistic quantification. Even the quality guru Deming, who is often associated with the use, if not over use, of statistics, has admitted that the most important things in life cannot be measured. How does one measure love, kindness, and generosity? The measures that are set out in the managerialist literature are often substitutes for qualities that are intangible or indirect. Colleagues in academic libraries have observed that `relatively little attention has been paid to qualitative measures, or to output measures, but indicators which fail to take such factors into account will be inadequate and misleading'. (2) At the same time commentators on the public sector have argued that `performance can seldom be expressed in a meaningful way by quantitative data only. To a great extent, analysis of performance has to be based on qualitative descriptions and statements'. (3) Thus we need to use sociological and psychological research skills to demonstrate the value of library services in terms of their impact on individuals, and society. In addition our approach should be concerned with soft as well as hard data. The management expert Henry Mintzberg (3) reminds us that `hard information is often limited in scope, lacking in richness and often failing to encompass important noneconomic and nonquantitative factors' Managers, and certainly those involved in marketing, also need to know about `The expression on a customer's face, the mood in the factory, the tone of voice of a government official'. …

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