De Jager, Karin2025-09-242025-09-242015Cox, B. and Jantti, M. 2012. Discovering the impact of library use and student performance. Educause Review http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/discovering-impact-library-use-and-student-performance [24 May 2015] Fraser, W. and Killen, R. 2005.The perceptions of students and lecturers of some factors influencing academic performance at two South African universities. Perspectives in Education. 23(1): 25-40. Higher Education South Africa. 2015.Available http://www.hesa.org.za/membership [26 May 2015]. International Organization for Standardization. 2014. Information and Documentation: Methods and Procedures for Assessing the Impact of Libraries: ISO16439. Geneva: ISO. Leonard, W.P. 2014. Mission statements: compasses without needles. University World News. Issue 305. Available http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140128152019205 [26 May 2015]. The Lyon Declaration on Access to Information and Development. 2014. Available: http://www.lyondeclaration.org/ [26 May 2015]. Markless, S. & Streatfield, D. 2013. Evaluating the impact of your library. 2nd ed. London: Facet. Poll, R. 2012. Can we quantify the library’s influence? Creating an ISO standard for impact Assessment. Performance Measurement and Metrics. 13(2):121-130. Poll, R. & Payne, P. 2006. Impact measures for libraries and information services. Library Hi Tech. 24(4):547-562. SouthAfrica.info. 2015. South Africa’s Universities. Available http://www.southafrica.info/about/education/universities.htm#.VWLrflJbi7A [26 May 2015].https://repository.ifla.org/handle/20.500.14598/5435This 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.enAttribution 3.0 Unportedhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Articlehttp://conference.ifla.org/ifla81open accessLyon DeclarationImpact assessmentISO 16439