Delivering Impact with Digital Resources: Planning your strategy in the attention economy

This book provides practical guidance for delivering and sustaining value and impact from digital content.

Our digital presence has the power to change lives and life opportunities. We must understand digital values to consider how organizational presence within digital cultures can create change. Impact assessment is the tool to foster understanding of how strategic decisions about digital resources may be fostering change within our communities. Delivering Impact with Digital Resources focuses on introducing both a mechanism and a way to thinking about strategies and evidence of benefits that extend to impact. Such that, the existence of a digital resource shows measurable outcomes that demonstrate a change in the life or life opportunities of the community. The book proposes an updated Balanced Value Impact Model (BVIM) to enable each memory organization to convincingly argue they are an efficient and effective operation, working in innovative modes with digital resources for the positive social and economic benefit of their communities.

Coverage includes:

• a guide to using the Balanced Value Impact Model and a wide range of data gathering and evidence based methods  
• exploration of strategy in the context of digital ecosystems, an attention economy and cultural economics 
• working with communities and stakeholders to deliver on promises implicit in digital resources/activities
• major case studies about Europeana, the Wellcome Trust and the National Gallery of Denmark, amongst others
• an exploration of the difference between the attitudes expressed by groups within digital cultures versus the actual behaviours they exhibit using impact exemplars from many sectors and geographies to show how they are explored and applied.

Readership: This book will be especially useful for those managing digital presences in libraries, archives, galleries and museums including MA and PhD students studying subjects such as librarianship, information science, museums studies, archival studies, publishing, cultural studies and media studies.

Contents

List of figures and tables 
List of case studies 
About the author 
Acknowledgements 
List of abbreviations 

Introduction 
Life writes its own stories 
The premise of this book 
The audiences for this book 
Structure of the book 
How to use this book 
Key definitions and concepts 

1 The context of measuring impact to deliver strategic value 
The demand for evidence-based strategies in the digital 
domain
Origins of impact assessment and variations on the impact 
theme
The importance of impact to memory institutions
Development of the Balanced Value Impact Model (BVI Model) 

2 The Balanced Value Impact Model 
Introduction 
Introducing the BVI Model 
The assumptions driving the BVI Model 
A five-stage process
Prerequisites for application of the BVI Model

3 Impact in libraries, archives, museums and other 
memory institutions
Framing thinking
Examples of impact in the GLAM sector 

4 Finding value and impact in an attention economy
The challenge of creating digital resources in an attention
economy
Defining the attention economy 
Examples of the attention economy 
The significance of the attention economy to memory 
institutions
Finding value in an attention economy 

5 Strategic Perspectives and Value Lenses 
Introduction 
Strategy and values in memory institutions 
Strategic Perspectives in the BVI Model 
Value Lenses in the BVI Model 

6 Planning to plan with the BVI Model 
BVI Model Stage 1: Set the context
Assigning Value Lenses to Perspectives in the BVI Framework
Using Stage 1 for strategic goals not associated with impact
assessment
Moving from plan to implementation

7 Implementing the BVI Framework 
Introducing the BVI Framework
BVI Model Stage 2: Design the Framework 
BVI Model Stage 3: Implement the Framework 

8 Europeana case study implementing the BVI Model
Introduction 

9 Using the outcomes of the BVI Model 
Transitioning from outputs to outcomes to impact 
BVI Model Stage 4: Narrate the outcomes and results 
Communicating the results 

10 Impact as a call to action 
BVI Model Stage 5: Review and respond 
Bringing the threads together 
Concluding thoughts 

References 

Index

Simon Tanner is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He is a digital humanities scholar with a wide-ranging interest in cross-disciplinary thinking and collaborative approaches that reflect a fascination with interactions between memory institution collections (libraries, museum, archives, media and publishing) and the digital domain. He is a member of the Europeana Impact Taskforce that developed the Impact Playbook. He teaches on the Masters in Digital Asset and Media Management and the BA in Digital Culture.