Thinking over ideas about 'library impact' and how one might create a narrative/ discourse/ discursive field (whatever), that featured a kind of 'extended set' of impact value. When I read about Michael Porter talking about shared value in the Harvard Business review I immediately thought "how might this be relevant to libraries"?

That's not an easy stretch! Because of course Porter is talking about business, and libraries aren't exactly that. Nevertheless ,what Porter does is to (at least potentially) reconnect the ideas of business, value and society. It seems to me that libraries (and in particular public libraries) have been putting value into their communities for, well, over 100 years now. Surely we've learned something about how to create and manage the output of shared value. And what is its impact? And… following Porter, how does it feed back to creating market value? That's just a final stage – part of a sort of multiple-format 'balanced scorecard' idea.

What one would have to do is create the 'value' of the value libraries create. Everyone is aware of this, which is why people get upset when they close. But we need a contemporary way to introduce those channels of value into the conversations we have nowadays. What is the nebulous value libraries offer? I'm quite sure it is there if we look.

So this is a kind of 'impact as a nominative technique', rather than as a 'measurement technique'. We create value by naming it: not by measuring it alone.

Let's name those values and see if they are worth something.