Evidence‐based Practice for Information Professionals:A Handbook

Some time ago a colleague from the one medical library in Lithuania asked me if I knew anything about evidence‐based practice in librarianship. I did know something at the time as I took part in the session “Is your library project evidence‐based?” at the IFLA conference in Berlin in 2003. However, that something was limited to the obvious knowledge that this paradigm has leaked into our profession from the health care and medicine field, and that evidence means research findings suitable to support practical decisions. After reading Evidence‐Based Practice for Information Professionals, edited by Andrew Booth and Anne Brice, anyone's knowledge base on evidence‐based information practice should be extended.

The handbook is structured into three main parts and the first – “The context for evidence‐based information practice” – provides a deep introduction into the understanding of the model, and its historical, social and other contexts.

Evidence‐based information practice is a product of the 1990s. It was first adopted from the medicine field by health care librarians and today has moved to the wider library and information science community. Brice and Booth start with the statement that stages of evidence based practice, defined by Sacket et al. (1997), such as “identification of a problem and question, finding the best evidence to answer the question, appraising the evident for validity and usefulness, applying the results to a specific population and evaluating the outcomes of the intervention” are integral parts of good information management, although only the first two are obvious activities of information practice. It is common for librarians to work with the fixed evidence – the information – supporting a variety of personal activities and professional practices, be they for doctors, nurses, managers or citizens requiring information to take informed decisions. Ann Ritchie, one of the authors of this manual in 1999 stated, that “As a profession which has the ability to manage the literature of research, librarianship is 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” (Ritchie, 1999). Real evidence‐based information practice starts when librarians and information specialists look for, assess and apply scientific evidence in order to make profession‐related decisions. The difference between supporting and practising is similar to that in sport – one can support sports and practise sport.

So, the authors raise the question why librarians do not practise what they preach, or rather state that library practitioners usually do not apply good information management principles in their own professional activities. Why do many information professionals take day‐to‐day decisions based on common sense or their own experience and professional judgment? In the first part readers will find a variety of answers and reasons, such as:

• •

  the communication gap common to professions where a division exists between practitioners and researchers;

• •

  misunderstandings of the evidence‐based information practice model;

• •

  the need to make decisions quickly;

• •

  poor quality/quantity of evidence related to LIS;

• •

  multidisciplinary knowledge base; and

• •

  lack of skills and resources required for evidence‐based decision making.

The second part starts with a table with six stages of the evidence‐based practice (EBP) process, and this well‐defined model is followed throughout the whole second part. So we have chapters on “Formulating answerable questions” by Andrew Booth, “Identifying sources of evidence” by Alison Winning, “Searching the library and information science literature” by Catherine Beverley, “Appraising the evidence” by Andre Booth and Ann Brice, “Applying evidence to your everyday practice” by Denise Koufogiannakis and Ellen Crumley, “Evaluating your performance” by Andrew Booth, and “Disseminating the lessons of the evidence‐based practice” by Ellen Crumley and Denise Koufogiannakis. A clear structure and good balance of examples, and illustrations makes this manual easily readable and dynamic. Compliments to the editors as the material is really quite consistently presented, having in mind the number of contributors – nineteen. It is, however, difficult not to notice a bias to medical and health information examples in the book, which generally is intended for the wider LIS community. Of course it is understandable, because of the model's origins and the professional experience of the authors, but this may be deterrent to some readers, fulfilling the fear of the authors “My only disappointment would be that EBL is currently still stuck in health sciences librarianship, and therefore librarians outside health sciences may dissociate themselves from the movement because of this” (p. 287).

The influence of health information practice is very strong in the third part, which examines and summarizes the evidence base in six LIS domains:

1. 1.

   information access and retrieval;

2. 2.

   collections;

3. 3.

   reference and enquires;

4. 4.

   management;

5. 5.

   education; and

6. 6.

   marketing and promotion.

I would strongly recommend this book to LIS students, for its clear structure and another view of problem solving process and decision‐making in library and information services.

Finally I want to reveal the question that was in my mind throughout the whole reading and reviewing process, although I provide no evidence to answer it: is this paradigm indeed so new and revolutionary for library management practitioners, especially in bigger academic and research libraries?