This chapter focuses on the first stage of the model and explains how to work through it when evaluating the impact of your service. Impact evaluation is essentially about three things:

The first stage of the evaluation process model is about focus.

Choosing where to get involved

If you are going to be more effective you need to choose how, where and with whom to get involved. Before you can make these decisions you should start with clarifying the impact you want to make – your objectives. However, you need to do this in the real world, so spelling out the objectives should take into account what is achievable. This means making careful choices and adopting clear priorities.

The basic constraint for librarians is having to spend so much time on managing and operating the library infrastructure. This makes it difficult to step back and look critically at what the library is really trying to do: where should you concentrate your efforts? In which areas might you most fruitfully develop your service? The first step in impact evaluation calls for thought about key foci (success criteria) for your service which you can then turn into objectives.

Lack of time is not the only problem; there are also issues of logistics. For example, in education librarianship there will always be many teachers and still more students to every librarian. Moreover, both teachers and students will spend much of their time out of physical reach of librarians, in the lecture room or classroom. Who should you target and how? Again, public library services are being called on to meet more and more externally imposed demands within existing resources. What should take priority and what should be left until later? Other types of libraries will encounter variations on these two constraints.

Responding to both these constraints may well boil down to making choices about where to concentrate on being efficient (relying on traditional performance indicators to monitor performance) and where it is important to show yourselves or other people that you are being proactive and effective, rather than spreading limited time across too many initiatives.