Designing tools to fill the void: a case study in developing evaluation for reading promotion projects

The Library and Information Statistics Unit at Loughborough University (LISU) was recently commissioned to develop an evaluation toolkit for a project aimed at supporting the development of new creative partnerships between libraries, museums and the arts using books and reading as a launch pad to develop new audiences and new venues for reading inspired creativity. Entitled “Books Connect”, the project comprised 13 individual cross‐domain events or initiatives that took place in the nine local authority areas in the East Midlands region of the UK in early 2002. These individual activities were very varied; involving different art forms, venues and partnerships, and featuring workshops, displays and performances and thus presented an interesting challenge in terms of creating a uniformly applicable set of performance indicators and data gathering instruments that could be used “in the field” by individual project managers. The specially created evaluation “toolkit” comprised a set of audience questionnaires and interview schedules as well as templates to gather reviews from co‐ordinators, and accounts of artists’ and partners’ experience of events and initiatives. The data gathered were assembled and analysed by LISU specialists.