Using a New ISO Standard to Measure the Impact of the Lyon Declaration

Abstract

This article attempts to demonstrate how libraries may assess the impact of the Lyon Declaration by using the recently developed standard; “ISO 16439 Information and Documentation: methods and procedures for measuring the impact of libraries”. According to the Lyon Declaration on Access to information and Development (2014), the right to information and exercising this right may be a transformational agent in people’s lives and of particular importance in environments where people are marginalized for various reasons including inequality on account of poverty, gender, disability or unequal access to education. Also, in recent years academic libraries have increasingly been attempting to measure the impact of their activities on their stakeholders. ISO 16439 aims to be a definitive statement on methods and approaches to impact assessment in libraries and is therefore applicable in situations where the intention is to assess the impact of specific initiatives to provide access to information and development. The commitment, as expressed in the mission statements of a number of South African universities to providing access to information and development to previously disadvantaged groups among their stakeholders, is explored. Based on the assumption that academic libraries function as agents of their parent bodies the universities, and that academic libraries are primarily focused on providing access to information to their communities, it becomes possible to identify methodologies proposed by ISO 16439 to assess the impact of such interventions, in this case activities specifically focused on students that were previously disadvantaged. The article provides an overview of ISO 16439 to show how it becomes practically possible to measure the impact of access to information and development as proposed in the Lyon Declaration.