First catch your student: issues in qualitative evaluation

The paper aims to present some points for discussion around issues in qualitative evaluation to do with access to sites and individuals, and relationships between the researcher/evaluator and participants. It is based on evidence from three projects in which the authors are, or have recently been, involved: JUBILEE (about monitoring and evaluating user behaviour in information seeking), EASE‐IT (about the encouragement of innovative teaching in engineering), and Virtual Gallery (a small scale local case study of a one semester option on a history of art course). The projects have encountered similar problems in relation to the collection of first hand qualitative data, and have relevance for the whole area of performance measurement in library and information studies, which is increasingly needing to also collect qualitative data as part of the evaluation of both projects and services.