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Funding and governance of library and information services for visually impaired people: international case studies

Part2:Country studies

UK

Measuring success

There are no national standards for measuring how well the UK is doing in providing services to visually impaired people.

There are IFLA Libraries for the Blind guidelines and the UK Best Practice Manual but neither are prescriptive.

There are no dedicated public library standards or impact measurements. The measures used by Public Libraries are all centred on the Public Library Standards, Culture Block of the Comprehensive Performance Assessments and Impact Measures. These are all generic indicators which don't necessarily identify such services. Any measurement will be entirely localised.

Individual local authorities also set local targets on aspects of their library service, although these are not nationally required and will vary from authority to authority depending on their assessment of community requirements (as assisted by community profiling). Local authorities are encouraged through community profiling to take soundings from all of the groups that they serve.

All such targets and measures are internally devised as with the education and voluntary sectors.

One respondent stated “There can be no overall coordination of performance management as there is no overall coordination of policy and service delivery. There needs to be a comprehensive survey to update the 2000 survey carried out by LISU [now out of print] and expand it to cover more than just public libraries but there are no financial resources to do so.”