Research, evaluation and audit: key steps in demonstrating your value

摘要

Reflective practice and professional development have been key priorities for developing the archives sector in recent years. It is therefore welcome to receive a new publication which aims to guide and encourage information practitioners to develop and use research, evaluation and audit skills. Such skills are not purely academic. The subtitle 'Key steps in demonstrating our value' is a reminder that working in an archive service inevitably means spending time collecting evidence to emphasize the worth of our work. Whether this is to show how a service is performing against a business plan, to demonstrate how your service meets a sector-wide standard or to evaluate a grant-funded project, archivists will have undertaken some stages of a research, evaluation or audit process. Indeed, development of any policy or plan is likely to be influenced by some preliminary research or reference to published research. Often the processes involved in research, evaluation and audit may already be familiar even if some of the terminology is not.