Documenting our Conversations

The following areas are what Mick, Kelisha and I discussed as being the most important to address when doing evaluation on OLA as well as across the Edge. They come directly from the 'The impact of libraries as creative spaces' from the Impact framework.

There are 8 points in the framework (You can see the links section to find them all) and we have decided that we will address 4 at this stage. We as a group decided that we would focus on these four as they are presently the four that The Edge focuses on the most. We also have chosen to go with these points as it is working within the language that Library is embracing. Aligning how we evaluate with the broader organisation.

The points are:

* ACCESSING RESOURCES

* IDEA BUILDING

*COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

*CULTURAL PARTICIPATION

We then unpacked the skills that we see participants gaining through the OLA process. There are:

* Ownership

* Critical literacy

* Design thinking and making

* Event planning

We also talked about how important it is that we frame our intentions to our clients about why we are asking them questions. We would be transparent in that we want to know what they actually want the library to be like. Also, to make sure that there is a sense of bottom up community actually happening like the edge wants it to be.

Currently the process has been across three platforms - Eventbrite (sign up info), EBMS (data to see repeat users) and survey monkey (gathering feedback on workshop experience)

Due to the nature of how The Edge is currently capturing data we are not able to see how we are being effective through actual data. Today we talked about potentially doing away with Survey Monkey and focussing on creating very specific targeted questions (based on the 4 framework questions) that would be asked on Eventbrite during sign up (pre) and after the workshop (post). Then we are capturing real data that then can be merged with EBMS and an excel pivot table could be made from both sets of data. Therefore we will be capturing data from doing a workshop and then see if there is the next step to accessing resources. This is the aim. Please see the Evaluation forms section to see the forms.

I also spoke with Peter (The science catalyst) who mentioned that he does a number of engagements where he is emailed asking for resources and he emails a whole bunch of specialised information to them (information that would be otherwise accessed via the wiki). This needs to be captured as data as well. How can we do this?