The Library and Information Research Group (LIRG)/SCONUL Impact Initiative ran from July 2003 to December 2005. 

Teams of (mostly library) staff from 22 UK universities took part in one of two annual cycles during which they each set out to measure the impact of a specific innovation in learning, teaching or research.  The majority of the chosen innovations focussed on aspects of information literacy or e-resource use. 

Seventeen of the teams submitted their final reports to the LIS-Impact website.  The first ten teams also contributed reports to a special issue of Library and Information Research and several others (e.g. Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of the West of England) have published their methods and outcomes to other audiences. 

The core ideas behind the Impact Initiative facilitation

The three main ideas that fuelled the facilitation of the teams in getting to grips with impact centre on:

1. Focus - Library service managers need to:
• move away from thinking about what services to deliver and how (which leads to evaluation of processes, based on traditional performance indicators),
• focus on what you are trying to achieve in offering a service, expressed as specific service objectives.  Once you are clear about what you are trying to achieve it is easier to see what evidence you need to tell whether you are getting there.  
2. Looking for change - Since impact usually means the impact of services on people, we are looking for changes in the people.  These changes may be:
• affective (attitudes, levels of confidence, satisfaction with the service)
• behavioural – people do things differently (e.g. asking different types of  questions, being more critical or more independent)
• knowledge-based (e.g. knowing about key sources of relevant information;  knowing what questions different databases can answer)
• competence-based - people do things more effectively (e.g. improved search techniques; able to find appropriate information)
  
3. Gathering evidence of change - To do this we need to resort to the social science research repertoire, sometimes supplemented by evidence of levels of use if this helps.  Social science research methods may be complex but, for our purposes, amount to variations on:
• asking questions (e.g. through questionnaires, interviews or focus groups)
• observing people (informally or in structured ways), or
• inferring impact from changes in what people produce as by-products of activity (e.g. changes in student projects or assignments
  

Taking impact evaluation further

The Impact Initiative approach

For a more exhaustive introduction to the approach to impact evaluation used by the Impact Initiative see:

Markless, Sharon and Streatfield, David R. Evaluating the impact of your library London: Facet Publishing 2006.  ISBN 13 978 1 85604 488 2

An electronic list of LIS impact developments, mostly based on the Impact Initiative and including all the project final reports, can be found at:

www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/LIS-Impact.html

Further information on impact evaluation:

A special issue of Library and Information Research 29 (91) Spring 2005 was devoted to the first cycle (2003-4) of the Impact initiative.  It includes introductions to the Initiative (Philip Payne and Angela Conyers) and facilitation process (Sharon Markless and David Streatfield), an independent overview (Pauline Blagden) and reports from each of the ten project teams.

A summative report of the project was published as:

Payne, Philip ‘The LIRG/SCONUL Impact Initiative: assessing the impact of HE libraries on learning, teaching and research’ Library and Information Research 30 (96) Winter 2006, 2-9.

A full description of the facilitated action research approach underpinning the Impact initiative appeared as:

Markless, Sharon and Streatfield, David R. ‘Gathering and applying evidence of the impact of UK university libraries on student learning and research: a facilitated action research approach’ International Journal of Information Management 26 (2006) 3-15.

Further reading on impact evaluation

For an overview of issues in impact evaluation for libraries and information services see:

Poll, Roswitha and Payne, Philip ‘Impact measures for libraries and information services’ Library Hi Tech 24 (4) 2006; also available at

http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/archive/00000373/

E-evaluation

To use statistical approaches in evaluating e-resource collections see:

White, Andrew and Kamal, Eric Djiva  E-metrics for library and information professionals: how to use data for managing  and evaluating electronic resource collections London: Facet Publishing 2006  ISBN 1 85604555 2

For the evalued toolkit to help with evaluation of electronic information services (covering processes, themes and tools), see:

www.evalued.uce.ac.uk/