Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“Success Stories” As An Evidence Form: Organizational Legitimization In An International Technology Assistance Project, Cheryl Klimaszewski, Gail E. Bader, James M. Nyce

Library Staff Research and Scholarship

This paper looks at how evidence and success were constructed in Biblionet - Global Libraries Romania, an NGO-led, technology-based project in Romania. The main focus of Biblionet is to provide public access to computers and the internet in public libraries throughout Romania. Here, we discuss how project staff relied on one particular set of measures to legitimatize, validate and "sell" their project to audiences in Romania and in the West. This NGO tended to "demonstrate" success using relatively weak measures. Perhaps the most suspect of these were, paradoxically, appeals to" science," that is to say, "hard" numbers and and one-time, …