Hypothesis , Vol. 34, No. 1, 2022

Giving New Life to Our Failures

Heather N. Holmes, MLIS, AHIP, Associate Editora,

aAssociate Director of Libraries, MUSC Libraries, Medical University of South
Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, , holmesh@musc.edu

In the Fall/Winter 2019 issue of Hypothesis: Research Journal for Health Information
Professionals we published our first Hypothesis: Failure! article. That article talked
about pitfalls of a library renovation and plenty of lessons learned along the way. The
next issue’s column addressed using reflective practice after (coincidentally) suffering
writing woes while writing an article about reflective practice. Now, for our 2022 issue
I’m pleased to share the article, A Pilot Project Exploring Low-tech Collaborative Board
Gaming on Student Attitudes Toward Interprofessional Education, that discusses a
relatively simple method of student engagement but like many things in life, timing is
everything and perhaps rolling out this initiative during a world-wide pandemic did not
set it up for success. The authors give a great background on the project and all the
reasons it should have been successful, but they provide thoughtful reasoning on why
they are submitting this as a failure.

Reading the article made me think a bit more about what my vision has been for this
column because while this month’s article is reported as a statistical failure, the
authors did recognize some anecdotal success with their project. When I first proposed
this column to then editors, Carol Perryman and Erin Foster, I told them I wanted to
have a place for libraries and librarians to report failures, lessons learned, or mistakes
that mattered. That is and remains my primary focus and criteria for submissions to
this column. However, I am a firm believer in using anecdotal “evidence” when
appropriate, especially if there’s high probability of it offering or lending to something
being successful. One could argue that much of Evidence-Based Library and
Information Practice (EBLIP) is anecdotal. While the numbers didn’t show success
with the project in this month’s article, the self-reported feedback from the students
who took part in it did feel there was benefit. There is more to this story as you will
see when you read the article, but I appreciated the authors perhaps unintentionally
making me, as the reader, think about other considerations within their failed study.

I invite you to share your failures as a way of giving back to the profession what you’ve
learned not to do the next time you try something. This column is not limited to
health science libraries or librarians so please encourage your colleagues in other types
of libraries to consider submitting an article. Regardless of which type of library we
work in, many of our practices, goals, and missions are the same. Because of that, we
can learn plenty of lessons from one another even if the failure wasn’t in a setting just
like our own.

Heather N. Holmes, MLIS, AHIP
Associate Editor

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