Articles, Evaluations and Reports

A: Evidence-based museums, archives and libraries work

A2: Towards Evidence-based Policy and Practice: some issues

2.1 The fundamentals of EBPP

When it comes to applying EBPP principles in practice, the key concerns common to all the main public sector applications mentioned so far include:

• availability of sufficient evidence of high enough quality to inform a specific practice question
   
• synthesis of the available evidence on a key question to provide an overview of the findings
   
• adequate dissemination of the evidence to enable practitioners to gain access to the evidence in an appropriate form
   
• identification of gaps in the evidence and strategic initiatives to fill important gaps
   
• disciplined reporting of the research processes and the evidence in 'practitioner-friendly' manner, to enable practitioners to gauge the relevance, importance and reliability of the evidence
   
• fostering of a strategic and operational management climate to encourage EBPP
   
• introduction of structures and mechanisms to encourage application of EBPP approaches
   
• professional development support for managers to equip them to find and appraise the evidence
   
• active debate about the nature and basis of professional knowledge and practice.
   

All of these components raise issues for the museums, archives and libraries (MAL) community.

2.2 The state of the evidence in MAL

The UK academic research evidence across the sector is clearly partial and patchy but there have been major projects executed and there is important evidence available on a number of questions derived from research conducted elsewhere, especially in North America, Australasia and Scandinavia.

UK evidence of service or project efficiency and effectiveness is being collected at all levels but with a distinct bias towards 'traditional' performance monitoring (efficiency indicators) for services. There is growing interest in assessing impact but this work is hampered by a shortage of baseline information and a dearth of reliable and appropriate assessment tools and the training required to apply them consistently.

Various ad hoc arrangements exist in the UK MAL sector for identifying and sharing good practice but there are no adequate clearing house arrangements to make such evidence readily available.

A more detailed assessment of the current utilization of academic research findings, in-house research and evaluation evidence by MAL practitioners and managers is shown as Appendix A. 

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