Measuring the impact of museums in their local communities

I have been asked to be a member of a steering committee established by Museums & Galleries NSW (mgNSW) to work on the Regional Audience Development Study. So how do we measure the impact of museums in their local communities? This is an issue that will continue to be of relevance to a broad range of museum folk across a range of institution types and sizes.

There have been two studies that I have been involved in that have looked at this issue from the local museum perspective. All the relevant papers and links from those studies can be viewed and downloaded on the measuring impact page on my audience research wiki. Some of the papers came from doing a simple Google search called "impact of museums", so there is a lot of available reference material.

I'd be interested in hearing about any other studies that people know of or have been involved in.