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Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 2006, 1:3
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Evidence Based Library and Information Practice
Commentary
Evidence Based Library and Information Practice: Whose Responsibility is it Anyway?
Gillian Hallam
Senior Lecturer
School of Information Systems
Faculty of Information Technology
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
E‐mail: g.hallam@qut.edu.au
Helen Partridge
Lecturer
School of Information Systems
Faculty of Information Technology
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
E‐mail: h.partridge@qut.edu.au
© 2006 Hallam and Partridge. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Increasingly, the discipline of library and
information science (LIS) is challenged to
engage in research in order to “create new
knowledge and thereby contribute to the
growth of LIS as a profession or discipline.
If research is absent, non existent or even
scarce, there is no profession, but only an
occupation grounded in techniques, routine
and common sense” (Juznic and Urbanija
325). In the United Kingdom in 2001, the
Centre for Information Research was
commissioned by the Chartered Institute of
Library and Information Professionals
(CILIP) to conduct an examination into the
research landscape of library and
information science. The examination
concluded that the value of research in the
LIS discipline can be experienced on both
the professional and personal levels. At the
professional level, research can inform
practice, assist in the future planning of the
profession, and raise the profile of both the
discipline and library and information
service itself. At the personal level, research
can “broaden horizons and offer individuals
development opportunities” (McNicol and
Nankivell 77). It seems, however, that
evidence based library and information
practice is currently a minority interest,
rather than a part of the mainstream.
McNicol and Nankivell wrote, “Work is
needed to stimulate greater interest in, and
respect for, research within the LIS
community” (82). They recommended that
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“research should be promoted as a valuable
professional activity for practitioners to
engage in” (82). The study by CILIP
concluded that for this to occur, there must
be an “obligation on the part of library
schools, employers, and professional bodies
to ensure that practitioners have the
necessary skills to be able to conduct
research effectively” (McNicol & Nankivell
82).
As LIS educators we can focus on the role
that library schools can play to foster a
research culture within the profession. We
can introduce specific teaching and learning
models to help develop student awareness,
understanding, and skills in evidence based
information practice. But our big challenge
is to encourage the other stakeholders –
individual professionals, employers, and
professional associations – to play a role in
working collaboratively with us to develop
the culture of evidence based practice (EBP)
that, ideally, should pervade our profession.
In this article we review some of our ideas
and experiences that have contributed to
shift the professional horizons of our own
goals.
The Need for Engagement
There is a certain degree of irony inherent in
our professional shortcomings, our lack of
focus on research within the discipline.
Crumley and Koufogiannakis observed that
“in our profession we help our patrons
make decisions by leading them to research
evidence. It is vital that we follow the same
model: We should consult our own
literature when we have questions about
best practices in our field” (112). Ritchie
also noted that given our role as managers
of the literature of research, library and
information professionals are uniquely
placed “to model the principles of evidence
based practice, not only as they apply to
other disciplines which we serve, but also as
they apply to our own professional
practice. . . . ’if you are not modelling what
you are teaching, you are teaching
something else’” (6). Library and
information professionals should indeed
‘practice what they preach’. In the context
of teaching, library schools undoubtedly
have a critical role to play to foster an
appreciation of research and its relationship
to the growth of the profession as a whole.
Brice et al. propose that “lobbying
educational institutions to increase research
and appraisal skills teaching in the
curriculum” (289) is one of several short
term priorities required to both sustain the
current interest in and to engage new
activists in the evidence based phenomenon.
At the 2nd International Evidence Based
Librarianship Conference held in 2003,
Schrader commented on the incongruity
between the prominence of research in the
ALA Standards for Accreditation of Masters
programs in Library and Information
Studies and the reality of current library
education in the U.S. Schrader lamented,
“Why research training is not a mandatory
component of every accredited program
remains a mystery to me, and why deficient
programs are able to get and continue their
accredited status is an even bigger mystery”
(171). These concerns may indeed echo
across the educational institutions in other
countries; both LIS educators and the
accrediting bodies should heed the need to
take action. In addition, as the call for
certification of practicing librarians becomes
more strident, the potential for professionals
to demonstrate knowledge and skills in
research moves beyond the campus and into
the workplace.
Identifying the Stakeholders
Booth has observed that one of the main
assumptions in fostering a culture of
evidence based practice is that “practitioners
are enlightened enough to want to practice
evidence based practice” (“Mirage” 57). For
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evidence based library and information
practice to succeed, library and information
professionals need to be willing to develop
the skills and knowledge essential for EBP
and to be motivated to use these within the
context of their day‐to‐day work. Whilst
current LIS education can help to foster the
birth of a new breed of evidence based
information professionals, ultimately it is up
to the new professionals working in
industry to put into place the skills they
have learned during their academic studies.
It is also the responsibility of those
professionals who have been in the field for
some time, and who have not had the
opportunity to learn about EBP via their
formal library studies, to develop the
necessary skills, knowledge, and
understanding of EBP by undertaking
professional development activities.
However, individual professionals clearly
cannot succeed in developing a culture of
EBP without the support of both their
employers and their professional
associations. Employers have a
responsibility to provide an environment
that encourages and rewards EBP and to
provide access to the resources and training
needed to implement EBP within the work
context. Professional associations have a
responsibility to encourage, enable and
reward the development of EBP skills and
knowledge within the profession as well as
developing and articulating the profession’s
EBP policies and future directions.
These views suggest that, whilst formal LIS
education can commence the process,
success will only be achieved when all
stakeholders in the profession actively work
together to build the desired culture. For
the LIS profession this means cooperation
and collaboration between professionals,
educators, employers and our professional
associations. We have developed a matrix
(Table 1) that seeks to identify the
contribution that could feasibly be made by
each of the different stakeholders in
pursuing the EBP goal.
Stakeholders Roles or Responsibilities
Professionals
Individuals have a responsibility to:
• Have the motivation to be evidence based information professionals.
• Ensure that they acquire and maintain the knowledge and skills
necessary for evidence based practice by completing professional
development programs.
• Undertake work‐based or higher degree research and actively take a
role in establishing a clearer and stronger link between theory and
practice within the profession.
Educators
Educators have a responsibility to:
• Provide and promote educational courses and qualifications necessary
for developing the skills required of evidence based information
professionals.
• Seek opportunities for updating their own practical skills and
knowledge to ensure relevancy and currency of curriculum.
• Provide and promote research degrees such as Masters by Research and
Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 2006, 1:3
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PhDs to the profession.
• Develop and deliver professional development courses in the area of
evidence based practice.
• Actively pursue research activities to generate new theoretical
knowledge.
• Seek opportunities for cooperative research and development activities.
Employers
Employers have a responsibility to:
• Provide the opportunities and resources for professionals to engage in
evidence based practice, including dissemination of findings to the
profession.
• Encourage and allow their staff to engage in ongoing learning and
professional development necessary for maintaining skills and
knowledge in evidence based practice.
• Provide opportunities for LIS students to learn about evidence based
practice in situ through fieldwork and project work.
• Participate in LIS course advisory work.
• Serve as guest lecturers and tutors within LIS education programs.
• Include evidence based practice activities as part of the staff appraisal
program.
• Encourage mentoring of evidence based practice for novice or
inexperienced research‐professionals.
• Provide opportunities for collaboration with academic researchers and
other industry employers on research project and funding.
Professional
bodies
The professional association has a responsibility to:
• Encourage, enable, and reward the learning and development of skills
and knowledge in evidence based practice within the profession.
• Determine and articulate a policy position on the role of evidence based
practice for the profession as a whole and in the education for library
and information professionals specifically.
• Encourage employers to support evidence based information practice
by recognising institutional members’ involvement in, and
dissemination of, evidence based projects as eligible for an individual’s
professional development points.
• Ensure that the profession’s research agenda, priorities, values, and
expectations are heard in government and by other key policy and
decision makers.
• Offer research awards and funding opportunities.
• Facilitate forums for sharing and dissemination of evidence based
practice knowledge.
• Arrange partnerships with training providers to provide training
courses in evidence based practice tailored to the specific needs of
diverse contexts (e.g., public libraries or law libraries).
Table 1: Stakeholders’ Roles and Responsibilities
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Strategies to Engage all Stakeholders
As LIS educators in the Masters of Information
Management program at the Queensland
University of Technology (QUT), we feel that we
can encourage professional discussion at the local
level through our involvement with industry
professionals, employers and the professional
association, both in and beyond the classroom.
Central to our teaching philosophy is the belief in a
holistic approach to student learning where the
personal and professional dimensions are
intertwined (Partridge and Hallam). We propose
that this holistic focus in LIS education can help the
twenty‐first‐century library and information
professional learn about the diverse research
methodologies that can be applied in the workplace
to gather, review, evaluate, and disseminate key
research data. The student is given the opportunity
to develop into a ‘reflective practitioner’, as
proposed by Booth, with the ability to “critically
analyse [and] make informed judgements”
(“Systems” 70), drawing on a toolbox of skills and
knowledge which will include evidence based
practice. To train the new evidence based
information professional, LIS education must
therefore focus on developing students’ skills as
reflective practitioners who are not only discipline
savvy but are also equipped with a rich portfolio of
generic capabilities, including communication skills,
teamwork, problem solving, and critical thinking.
Critical reflection is increasingly identified as a core
skill required by all professionals. For many
students entering the Masters course, reflective
practice is a novel and unexplored – and often
challenging – domain. Taking this into
consideration, the program has been designed to
provide students the opportunity, over the three
semesters of study, to progressively gain both
theoretical understanding and practical experience
in reflective practice. Four units over the three
semester program have been developed to provide
the context for the students to learn about and to
experience reflective practice firsthand. Students
are encouraged to use reflective practice as a tool
both for self evaluation and for the review of team
processes, to compose a reflective learning journal
to support the construction of their own
understanding and knowledge development, and to
conclude their studies with the creation of a
professional portfolio which presents their
reflections on their own role as an information
professional.
In addition to the blend of discipline knowledge
and generic capabilities, the Masters program
includes authentic learning activities and the direct
involvement of industry professionals. The
involvement of industry professionals contributes
significantly to the success of our holistic model of
LIS education. Industry professionals provide the
authentic context from which students can directly
learn about discipline knowledge and generic
capabilities within the profession. They contribute
to the LIS program through three vital roles: as
guest speakers, as mentors, and as industry
partners in the learning activities. It is through the
direct involvement of professionals that students
grasp the amazing diversity of information
problems and the range of possible approaches to
solve them. Through the learning tasks developed
collaboratively with industry professionals and
employers, students are offered a fertile context to
apply the skills and knowledge they acquire within
the academic confines of their studies.
Fieldwork placements and industry based projects
are an invaluable source of linking theory to
practice within an authentic learning environment.
Increasingly, libraries and information agencies in
the region are contacting us to initiate interesting
and challenging project work that not only enables
students to become directly involved in authentic
research activities, but it also encourages the cross‐
fertilisation of ideas and skills between the students
and the professionals. Such opportunities help
students – and professionals – begin to think
critically about the skills, knowledge, attributes,
conceptual structures, and thinking processes that
they need as working information professionals.
Ideally, it will also see industry professionals
inspired to enrol in Masters by Research courses, to
help build a research culture and to increase the
capacity for knowledge development with the LIS
discipline.
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In our roles as Joint‐Chairs of the 3rd Evidence
Based Librarianship Conference held in Brisbane,
Australia, in October 2005, we were able to involve
the national professional association as the host for
the event. The Australian Library and Information
Association (ALIA) has consequently
played an important role in encouraging
professional debate, resulting in a better
understanding of the issues, thereby inviting a
stronger degree of commitment on the part of both
professionals and employers. Whilst LIS education
can adopt a proactive stance in fostering EBP within
the profession by including relevant and necessary
skills within the LIS curriculum, an evidence based
culture within the library and information
profession will not be achieved unless all
stakeholders are actively and proactively engaged
with the process.
Conclusion
Our own teaching and learning model is just one
possible approach to embedding EBP within LIS
education. We do believe that fostering a culture of
EBP requires LIS education to serve as the
cornerstone to equip library and information
professionals with the necessary skills and
understanding to become reflective practitioners in
an evidence based industry, with the aim of
progressing professional knowledge. Accordingly,
we strive to develop a curriculum which focuses on
content that is topical and relevant, but which at the
same time helps develop the individual dimensions
of the students so that they graduate with a sound
understanding of the full spectrum of professional
and personal attributes that they will need for
successful careers as LIS professionals. It would be
beneficial for LIS education, and for the future of
the library and information profession in general, if
other teaching and learning models were presented
and critically discussed. This profession requires an
informed discussion at both the national and
international levels about the specific skills and
knowledge required by the evidence based library
professional, about the best teaching and learning
approaches that will help to prepare and educate
future evidence based professionals, and about
ways to firmly establish an evidence based culture
within the profession, so that the profession itself
truly has a future.
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