Assessing our Worth: Value and Impact

Programme Features

A practically oriented one-day course, comparing and exemplifying ways of finding and demonstrating the value and impact of information and library services. The programme includes:

• importance of showing value and impact
• framework for assessing value and impact
• assessing value in money terms
• finding the `real impact`
• understanding benefits in detail
• choosing the right method

Why you should attend
Demonstrating the value provided by information and library services has never been more important. In difficult economic circumstances, any part of an organisation which cannot demonstrate its value, in terms which are convincing to top management, will find problems. Information services have too often relied on an assumption that they are essential, or on `soft` measures of user approval.

This course describes and exemplifies some ways in which libraries and information services have gone about trying to go beyond this: by showing their financial value, by showing that they make a real difference to the work and the lives of their users, and by showing in detail how and why they bring benefits.

• understand a variety of methods for assessing and demonstrating value and impact
• appreciate how this fit in with "conventional" evaluation methods
• choose appropriate methods for a given situation

Time: 09.45-17.00