Everything counts: impact stories leading to success

Almost two hundred vulnerable youth in Ghana return back to studies; farmers in Serbia increase the crops and start selling products online; unemployed people in Macedonia find jobs. These remarkable changes happened due to new and innovative public library services. Here are only 3 examples of many innovative service projects, started with EIFL-PLIP (http://www.eifl.net/plip) small grants to libraries in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. All over the world, libraries are gaining the name of the cost-effective and trusted partners in community development. Today libraries have the tools to expand our access to new information, each other, and the world at large. They are places where people are acquiring knowledge from new and innovative services using Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Knowledge is power, and that power is being channeled by libraries to address pressing community challenges, such as issues of public health, rural development and farming efficiency, unemployment, and life prospects of youth at-risk. In many countries public libraries have long tradition of partnership with governments, philanthropies, and the private sector, to provide services and programs to community members, however track of success stays at quantity of activities (or workload) level, leaving impact and meaning un-recorded, therefore un-revealed. The paper presents a model to measure impact of library innovative services and using impact data to ensure their sustainability. The model consist of three steps: investigating the impact, writing a success story and communicating it to the stakeholders. One year after the project end, EIFL contacted the libraries again to investigate if the new services had continued. We found that following this strategy of measuring, writing up and communication impact stories, most of the libraries managed to secure support to maintain and expand their services. With the proper funds and resources, this success can be spread to other libraries to improve lives and livelihoods of people in communities all around the world.