RESOURCE CENTRE MANUAL
HEALTHLINK WORLDWIDE
1. Availability of the service
• number of hours intended to be open per month (or quarter or year)
• number of hours actually open per month (or quarter or year)
• number of hours the resource centre was staffed per month (or quarter or
year).
2. Visits
• total number of visits made each month
• number of visits made by each user each month, or the total number of
repeat visits
• average number of visits made each day that the resource centre is open
• number of visits made each month by different categories of user (such as
hospital doctors, nurses, community health workers, administrative staff,
regional and district health team members, students and others).
This information can be obtained by asking visitors to fill in either a visitors’
book which invites this information (see Section 7.2.1: Welcoming visitors), or
a monitoring form. A sample monitoring form is given in Section 9.2.2.
To make sure that information from visitors is collected, staff must either
check that each visitor has completed the visitors’ book or monitoring form
before the visitor leaves, or staff must enter details themselves, based on
information gathered while assisting the visitor.
3. Acquisition of materials
• total number of new acquisitions (books, periodicals, reports, slide sets,
audio-cassettes, videos)
• total number of materials for which new editions have been obtained
• total number of materials weeded
• number of new acquisitions as a result of efforts made by staff or the
resource centre advisory committee and other users
• number of new materials paid for and average cost
• number of materials donated, or exchanged for publications
• number of materials obtained that were published in the country/region
• number of materials added to each subject area of the collection in the past
month.
Most of this information can be obtained from the accessions register (see
Section 4.6.2), and entered onto a form. It is important to collate these records
regularly, such as once a month. Otherwise it becomes a time-consuming task,
and there is a risk that it will not get done, and that the information will be
lost.
4. Materials used
• subject areas most often requested or used in the past month
• types of materials most often requested or used in the past month.
4 SECTION 9: MONITORING AND EVALUATION