ABSTRACT
Over the past decade the author and Sharon Markless have run a series of workshops for a total of more than 800 library service managers who were attempting to evaluate the impact of their services. Many of the participants in the workshops, especially in the earlier years, were in a position to choose whether and how to get involved in impact evaluation. They could decide to stick to their existing activity measurement processes or to aspire to look beyond service efficiency and try to gauge the effectiveness of their services from a user perspective. In the first few years of running workshops for library managers they found that at the beginning of each event most of the participants struggled to get to grips with how to evaluate the impact of services. When they try to use research evidence to help decide on potential areas of service impact, people developing boutique library services are relatively well placed.
