Confessions of a technophile

We often hear of stories of people benefiting from library services in one way or another. An entrepreneur who made it big after attending a workshop, or a student who now turns in better quality homework after acquiring search skills at an information literacy class. Librarians share these stories with one another because it humanizes the work they do.

More importantly, these stories answer an important question: the "so-what?" of library services. They go beyond visitorship numbers and other loan statistics. These numbers, while important in planning because they help assess the efficiency of the library in converting inputs (staff time and dollars) to outputs (number of loans, programs and library members), do not tell us about the impact of libraries on its users. So what if teens check out more books? What difference does it make to them whether they check out more or less books? What the library does is not the aim in itself, it's what the library does to bring users closer to their goals that matters.

Through anecdotes, we know the impact of library services on users, and not the library's efficiency in converting inputs to outputs. However, there is a tendency for libraries to measure their success based exclusively on library-oriented statistics that measure what librarians use and do. Few libraries measure outcomes which look beyond statistics to include their impact on users. Note that even when we conduct customer satisfaction surveys, we are asking users about us, not about them!

Part of the reason for this is that some outcomes are hard to measure in the short term, and even then, the impact on users may not be totally attributed to a library service.

It will take me several posts to run through the whole process of determining user impact, but the long and short of is this: 1) identifying programs for outcome measurement, 2) determining interim and long-range outcomes, 3) make those outcomes measurable, 4) data collection and analysis, and, finally, 5) implementation. More details of each step are further elaborated in Rubin's Demonstrating Results in the PLA's Results Series. I applied this process for a library gaming service I was working on in the U.S. and found it to be highly effective in measuring the impact of our program beyond the numbers.

So, the next time you look at loan and visitor numbers for the month, start asking "so-what?" Librarians need to answer that question convincingly, if they want to claim that they are making a difference to people's lives.