Impact Planning and Assessment of public libraries: a country level perspective

This is the first of a cluster of papers which seek to describe the work of impact planning and assessment (IPA) specialists at country level within the Global Libraries Initiative (GL) of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The paper describes the evolution of the approach to IPA developed by country specialists and outlines the main elements of the GL IPA Roadmap, which encapsulates this general approach. The Roadmap is a four‐stage process designed to ensure that IPA specialists know how to go about the needs assessment, baseline study and surveys involved in IPA at country level.

The paper underlines the need to collect required and recommended metrics for comparison and advocacy purposes and to take on the challenge of showing the impact of the country programmes in changing people's lives.

This paper shares the IPA learning at country level with people in other countries who may be contemplating public library evaluation at national, regional or local level or who are interested in impact evaluation.