The Evidence-based Librarian

What is the role of the Medical Library Association during a time of crisis?

2011-12-21T22:58:00.001-05:00

I have read and responded to recent posts on Medlib-L feeling the desperation and anger expressed by some librarians as their libraries close, as they talk about re-educating, wondering where the magic key might be. I read it and wonder whether the answer is an acceptance of changed/changing times.

Will we go the way of the 8-track? How much of our response is due to fear of change – and can we even know if this is so?

Some feel compelled to persuade administrators that without our expertise, health care quality is a deteriorated thing, based upon ignorant, sloppy searches (if searches are done rather than just flat-out retrieval, a la UpToDate). While efforts are ongoing to establish value, is it too little, too late, too unpersuasive? If we had the Gettysburg address of persuasiveness –unalterably and inarguably persuasive, would this reverse the tide?

Some feel the role of associations (in this case, MLA) is to help, even to lead a fight against loss, while others are embittered over what they see as past advocacy failures by the same associations to support the needs of non-academic practitioners. It is not a new perception. Nor is it completely without merit.

And yet: The MLA Hospital Library Section’s Vital Pathways survey, conducted as the result of an intiative of then-MLA President M.J. Tooey, captured data not elsewhere assembled (Tooey, 2010).

The MLA Education and Research Sections rewrote standards to provide guidelines for change in order to empower practitioners, pointing toward more rigor in research in an environment where best evidence is highly regarded.

The Research Policy statement expressly reinforces its “commitment to assure the vital presence and continued growth of both individuals and the profession of information research” (MLA Research Policy Executive Summary).

Meanwhile, the Education Policy Statement could not be more clear in its call for action:

“In light of the rate of environmental change, the specific knowledge and skills required of health sciences librarians, and the broad scope of the continuum of learning, it is clear that all who have a stake in the success of the profession need to take action” (MLA Education Policy Statement: Recommendations for Action).

I post this to refute the idea that MLA, as an entity, has not supported library practitioners. But I would also like to see the kind of discussion that is happening on the Medlib-L list take a broader form. This is time for leadership in exploring, and there is a real need for facilitation of peer support networking. I have seen how often hospital librarians use the listserv for many functions, including research, news, job postings, and importantly, to create and sustain a vitally important network of peers. For some, there are no geographically close peers; librarians are truly alone. Libraries close with a whimper, and they are mourned. There is anger, but little sense of direction. There is loss but where is healing?

Maybe it is in our involvement with our own association in ways that we have not been involved before, due to the perception that MLA is not representing our interests.

Hospital librarians still constitute around 30% of MLA members, including those active in the Hospital Library Section. First, I believe that MLA should consider free or low-fee membership to librarians who have lost their jobs, or whose jobs are otherwise affected. Secondly, MLA/HLS might consider funding a research study hard on the heels of the Vital Pathways survey.

Let us begin to understand the work environment of medical librarians in ways we do not, now. With that understanding, let us support the retooling of the profession, set the agenda for a discourse on change, investigate educational funding options for those who are deeply affected.

If there is fear and loss, let us recognize it and respond to our colleagues. If there is to be change, let us find the path together.

Misleading titles for $10,000: "Surprising decline in consumers seeking health information"

2011-12-07T10:08:00.000-05:00

In one of those all-too-frequently overhyped announcements, the Center for Studying Health System Change drew attention to their new tracking report, published November 11, and now making rounds on consumer health oriented sites and medical/consumer health library listservs. I have to wonder if the same author wrote the content and the title of the announcement, because the content is solid - and because there really IS a good story here - well worth further study - but it got missed in the hype. Takeaways from this study include the following:

Resource media type shifts: Reported use of print, television, and radio as resources for health information has dropped between 2007-2010. Meanwhile, online source use has risen only slightly, leading the study authors to speculate about cause. However, question construction and sampling changes may have had some effect upon results (see below).
Change in health information seeking by those over 65: Seniors' use of online health information increased from 17% to 24% during the same period.
Without more complete transparency, comparison of responses across the 3 studies (2001, 2007, and 2010 - the basis for the authors' conclusions) is problematic.

Overall, there is an obvious downward trend of health information seeking behavior, but my own takeaway is that numbers and statistics about information sources are never the whole story. The question should also be whether what was found proved satisfactory in answering health concerns.The report may also reflect a flattening trend, as the prior study found huge leaps in the use of online resources. None of the studies asked what specific resources were used, whether information was located, or whether the information located matched their questions.

--------------------------------------------------------

Bolding is my own:

In 2010, 50 percent of American adults sought information about a personal health concern, down from 56 percent in 2007, according to a new national study from the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). The likelihood of people seeking information from the Internet and from friends and relatives changed little between 2007 and 2010, but their use of hardcopy books, magazines and newspapers dropped by nearly half to 18 percent.

What you need to know: the study questions permitted overlap, so that respondents could check any and all information sources (see Table 1, footnote). In other words, some of what we may be seeing is that people who used to seek their health information in hardcopy and online are now using paper less frequently.

In 2007, there were three leading sources of health information—books, magazines and newspapers in print format; friends and relatives; and the Internet—each used by roughly one-third of adults to seek health information for themselves. By 2010, the use of friends/relatives and the Internet remained relatively steady, but the use of print media fell sharply—33 percent to 18 percent—accounting for much of the drop in overall information seeking.

The previous tracking report, published in 2008, announced a Striking Jump in Consumers Seeking Health Care Information. In fact, the earlier study (2001), against which the data is compared, used a different participant selection method. While the authors were commendably transparent in their methodologies for the all-too-brief summation made publicly available, the 2001 study used cluster sampling, while the 2007 update employed stratified random selection:

Although both surveys are nationally representative, the sample for the 2000-01 survey was largely clustered in 60 representative communities, while the 2007 survey was based on a stratified random sample of the nation (section on Data source: http://www.hschange.org/CONTENT/1006/#ib8).

Data provided in the online report is insufficient to make this call, but it is not out of the question that sampling methods used in the 2001 study were changed for the 2007 and 2010 studies because they were problematic in some way. In cluster sampling (used in 2001), it's important to know whether within-cluster responses are homogeneous, but what I don't know from reading the summative report is how this was tested in practice.

The authors speculate that differences in source usage may be due to negative or frustrating experiences in health information seeking, frustration and confusion caused by (online) information overload, or even to a decline in health visits due to the economic downturn.

The decline in health information seeking may reflect, in part, consumers’ reactions to their previous experiences with health information ('Implications,' para. 2, http://www.hschange.org/CONTENT/1260/#ib5).

The real question to ask here is whether we are seeing a flattening-out of health information seeking activities, with saturation of use from those who now regularly use online sources? Might the flattening-out also reflect a decreasing tendency to seek information from multiple sources, as people find preferred sites and (in the case of chronic health conditions) online communities?

Mentioning MedlinePlus.gov as a leading source of reliable health information, the report concludes, in part:

Such resources can be valuable consumer tools; however, the consumers best positioned to locate these resources and use them constructively likely are already informed, sophisticated consumers. As a result, the gap between the haves and have-nots among health information consumers is likely to continue growing.

In efforts to address this disparity, policy makers—including the Institute of Medicine and the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—have implemented initiatives both to improve health literacy in consumers and to make information accessible and actionable to consumers across a broader range of health literacy skills.

These reports don't just highlight the gap between haves and have-nots, they also identify a rich opportunity for research about what sources are used and why there appears to be a decline in resource types. For those who are concerned with supporting the health information needs of health consumers, this is a call for our involvement.

Librarians and informaticians on the health care team

2011-11-11T07:50:00.001-05:00

Free full text available on the journal site, along with 29 other intriguing essays in response to the editor's 2011 Question of the Year: "What improvements in medical education will lead to better health for individuals and populations?"

Teaching Physicians to Make Informed Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty: Librarians and Informaticians on the Health Care Team
Moore, Mary; for the Association of Academic Health Sciences Librarians

Academic Medicine. 86(11):1345, November 2011.

doi: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e3182308d7e

From the essay:

As medicine becomes more complex and information technologies transform decision making, physicians must learn not only how to apply new tools and technologies effectively but also new ways of decision making that foster multiple inputs, including team input. Reaching this goal will require informatics education integrated throughout the medical curriculum, faculty role models with searching minds who understand biomedical and health informatics, and continuing education to retrain those who were educated under older models.

Librarians have been envisioning this future since the 1970s, when clinical medical librarians joined health care teams that included students, residents, attending physicians, nurses, nutritionists, and others. In the 1980s, librarians embraced a vision for the future where all health information systems would be connected when at all possible,and they have been working toward that future ever since.

Defended!

2011-08-17T17:25:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to say that I successfully defended my dissertation on August 9th. This morning I read an interesting post from a new assistant prof, talking about a bit of post-defense let-down. I think I get that. The last bit prior to defending was my version of a high-speed chase right to the edge of a steep cliff... the cliff being several deadlines that had to be met. Meanwhile, I was teaching summer school for the first time ever, 3 courses. Not advisable, folks.

Now it's prep for fall - what happened there? I seem to have crossed some Twilight line, where time vanishes. I'm not sure what's in the news. We had the absolute pleasure of visiting the library yesterday, where I found a few items of questionable literary value but hopefully good entertainment value. Plus, I hit a small motherlode of nearly my favorite kind of book: the autobiographical foodie account. MFK Fisher only wrote so many things, and it's certain that others (Colwin, Bourdain) are no Fisher, but there's something irresistible about these works to me.

As I'm thinking about getting an e-reader (once there is not more month left than paycheck) I keep wondering if this sort of indulgence can be experienced in that form. One book, about the history of women through cooking, is large and heavy... the text is pretty bad, stylistically, and I'd never buy it, but the images are great. I would not buy this as an e-text, and I am not at all sure I'd check it out from the library. Besides, what's all that mess about publishers restricting the number of items libraries can check out to each patron? I don't think so. Part of the joy for me has been leaving the library so overloaded that my arms ache. I used to be able to check out back issues of This Old House, and you know I flipped right to the back to see the remuddled building, taking pleasure in tsk-tsking at the tackiness of 70s siding on a Queen Anne. Books are weight relished, to me. Although. I need weight and lightness, depending - but I want to make the choice myself.

Hmm. Nice to think about something besides the you-know-what. I thought my husband was going to put a sock in it, because it's all I talked about for years. I'll get back to the topic of this blog, but right now - it's nice to be doing something else.

Connecting dots: Postpassivity (?) and pro-assessment. AKA whither goest, anon

2011-04-29T20:24:00.000-04:00

Three items in my feed over the past week or so: Peter Hernon/Candy Schwartz sound off on the need to teach assessment and evaluation in LIS programs (Library & Information Science Research in press), and an Inside Higher Ed post by Barbara Fister discusses expectation gaps between faculty and academic library directors - and the lack of solid strategic plans for the library. Meanwhile, another Inside Higher Ed column focuses on the worrying trend of going by the numbers for outcomes evaluation in education.

Says Fister:

First, Ithaka surveyed library directors and found that only about a third of them agree with the statement “my library has a well-developed strategy to meet changing user needs and research habits.” Two thirds don't.

Responses cited above may be problematic, as it's one of those kinds of questions, where you read it and think 'yes, but' - as in, 'Yes, but - my library is changing so rapidly that existing strategic plans are currently under revision. In fact, I'm late for a meeting,' as in 'Yes, we had a plan, but then the budget got cut and more is on the way.' I'm not a library director so I don't know: is it possible or practicable to place strategic planning in a template for action while simultaneously waiting foran axe to fall? I have not read the entire 43 page report, which appears to be of some importance. Key point of Fister's editorial is that we're in trouble if we don't do a better job of communicating with our stakeholders:

Half of the survey respondents couldn’t even venture a guess as to whether faculty were aware or not [of the library and its services], which either means libraries are doing a poor job of communicating the issues or faculty aren't listening.

Fister concludes with an anecdote about the spur-of-the-moment decision to physically dismantle the library's reference desk to see if better solutions can be found. Get off your swivel chairs and get a screwdriver, she insists - go do something now!

Meanwhile, Hernon and Schwartz push for assessment/evaluation content in LIS coursework, arguing that

With so much in the literature of library and information science on the culture of assessment or evaluation, we concur that the concepts and methods behind assessment and evaluation merit coverage and an expectation that students can apply what they are learning. However, each might involve experimental designs and anyone dealing with assessment (or evaluation for that matter) should know how to analyze and present findings to different stakeholders.

I see a tension here between the do-it-now school of thought and the other academy, which urges more rigorous examination of user needs.

Meanwhile, there's that concern mentioned previously about 'by the numbers' outcome assessment:

Experts in a field spoke to numbers of students, interviewed faculty, observed classroom lectures, and, using their own experience and expertise as backdrop, arrived at a holistic conclusion. There was nothing "scientific" about the process, but it proved remarkably successful. This is the accreditation that is universally acknowledged to have enabled American colleges and universities to remain independent, diverse, and the envy of the world.

In this op-ed, Bernard Fryshman reminds the reader that numbers in education are really the outcome of widget production economies, a strategy that was snapped up eagerly by higher education and beyond.

Advocates persisted, and states, one by one, were convinced of the necessity to measure student learning. And measure they did! Immense amounts of money, staff time, and energy went into gathering and storing numbers. Numbers that had no relevance to higher education, to effectiveness, to teaching or to learning. "Experts" claimed that inputs didn't count, and those who objected were derided as the accreditors who, clipboard in hand, wandered around "counting books in the library."

Oh, right - that sounds familiar. But he's saying this had nothing to do, really, with human behavior in education or anywhere else. Do you see what I'm puzzling over here? These are truth claims. How the world is run, or should be, how things work - what will work. Amidst recognition that there are problems, champions call for their solution to be adopted. More, too. Echoes here of the same sort of historical tension found in the medical literature about the need to adopt evidence-based medicine - and going farther back, more of the same. I'm not saying any one of them is wrong. Maybe they all should be right. Where is the point at which these elements (and more?) mesh to meet these differing claims, which are each about the same elephant? Hmm.

I think I'm talking about the need for translational research.

2nd verse: same as the first

2010-12-21T20:02:00.000-05:00

So here I am gearing up to teach consumer health for the first time at TWU. Last semester it was intro to health science librarianship, and I found myself a bit adrift, but having to be ok with that. If I am to walk the walk, what I teach must be transparent and participatory, should be integrated with ideas of evidence-based practice. What does that mean?

not making truth claims
being ready to be wrong
being ready to be unsure
being ready to base my work and claims on best practices
being capable and willing to assess outcomes, acknowledging my own tendency to bias

There is no comfort-space here in health science librarianship. We don't know where we're going but past the uncertainty, there is (I feel it!) opportunity. Reading Patricia Anderson's 'lessons learned' post, in which she assembles the results of a lively, ongoing conversation taking place weekly via tweet, the open door is visible. There are permeable barriers between health professionals and health consumers and health science librarians. There is, as there was with Second Life, a tendency for those uninvolved to brush away excited claims from new frontier explorers. There is, as with calls for our involvement in new ways such as informationists, a lack of evidence to support such excursions - twinned with a recognition by those involved that this matters.

I wonder how to provide glimpses of the possible to aspirant health information professionals when it is anything but clear to me. Is what I need try to convey the uncertainty and the excitement? When new students ask, where is health science librarianship headed - how can I say I know (and give false comfort), when I do not (and still, find challenge as I have for several decades)? It has to come from honesty and transparency, presenting myself as a learner too. As I am.

A delicate balance

2010-11-01T09:25:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, I practiced walking/running intervals in the local park. For the first time, I managed to run (ok, jog) 1/2 mile straight. From the perspective of June, when I waited to be sure that I'd be unseen in my ridiculous and clumsy attempt before jogging what may have been a whole 200 yards, this is a remarkable accomplishment! I am insufferably pleased with my efforts.

It's evidence that while I felt myself tethered to my computer (with kudzu, I imagined, grown there while in Chapel Hill), there is life beyond doctoral studies, beyond the virtual. The body abides, but is moaning its neglect, and slowly creaks through enforced paces. Stasis seems most natural, but is an illusion: the reality is a gradual decline that goes unnoticed, but for the familiar aches of a chairbound body. There is an inevitability to that subsidence, from which we shy away.

When I walk 1/8th mile, then run 1/4, I give my legs time to recover. Underused muscles loosen, breath and heart slow; by the end of that time I am ready to pick up the pace again. At times my body moves as it is meant to do, all parts in sync, and I find myself closer to the dream of lightness and joy. Experienced runners pass me, reaching with gazelle-strides, shining with sweat, nearly airborne. It is not yet possible that I could be among them. Do I want to be? - I continue to look, and remember myself as a child sprinting barefoot, put to run with the boys because I outran all the girls.

During other moments, I feel twinges and the stubborn pull of tiredness, and look for the marker that means I can slow down, utterly bound to the earth. In order to improve my stamina and strength, I have to know my body and respect it, learn to listen to those messages. But how do I discern the difference between limits that must be pushed, and those that should be respected? I learn.

I must have both moments. Limits to presence: transcendency. Pragmatism, limit-escaping; knowing self, dreaming of possible selves. Teaching - and LIS itself - are the same for me, but involve the conscious inclusion of the what is and what might be, what is certain/uncertain; what is known and what (everything) should be questioned.

The power and passion of LIS is thoroughly grounded in both historical presence and near-ethereal idealism, and both sustain us and drive us toward the future. We are limited by earth-boundedness, in this sense our overwhelming awareness of political and economic realities, the small and large fires faced daily.

Can we retain our idealism and drive for change as a positive force through the present era? The lift and memory of flight, insubstantial as they seem to be, must be nourished by all in order to retain viability as a profession.

No-GoLocal - we give away the keys

2010-04-29T00:26:00.000-04:00

Seeing the story here connected dots between the recent announcement that NLM is cutting the cord on support to GoLocal efforts. A quote:

People want to know what's going on locally. People want to shop locally. People want to network locally. And hyperlocal services make it easier to engage in and market to a local community. Technology need no longer be feared by local businesses as something that would drive their customers elsewhere - namely online.

Although location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla have received significant attention as part of this trend, they are far from the only services. Hyperlocal search and news sites are two other services that have seen recent growth.
Last week, Milo.com, a website that enables shoppers to research products online but then make their purchases locally, added products and real-time inventories for over 100 independent, mom-and-pop stores across the country. While Milo.com has served the "big box" stores for some time, this move to incorporate smaller retail outlets marks another way in which the local is starting to take advantage of online opportunities.

This makes my head hurt. Just as we (speaking generically of medical libraries) flip the switch on local efforts to support a growing number of healthcare consumers, commercial ventures find new blood by tracking to the 'hood.

I feel as if we've just ensured that we will continue to matter less at the precise time when we should be working to matter more to those who need support. Says NLM, usage is low -- and there were always problems, anyway:

However, while a few Go Local sites managed to maintain an atmosphere of success, there were always concerns expressed by staff at the sites and at NLM, regarding the amount of staff time required to maintain each site, low use at many sites, the inability of some sites to keep records current, shrinking library budgets that resulted in fewer resources to support and sustain sites, and NLM inability to increase funding levels due to a tight federal budget.

I can only commend those health science libraries who plan to transform their years of effort to community resource pages -- but I wonder why we can do no more than shake our heads. Or are we? Maybe it's the money, and all people can do is keep treading water? I don't know what the thinking is here, but I've seen nothing on the Medlib-L list, no announcements from anyone. And I think we need a Bill Gates in our corner here. Just sayin. And if you'd like to think about this a little more, check out the first comment on the story:

I think this is a great article! I'd like to add that the foundation for the hyper-local is missing. There are two different things happening:
1) Companies like FourSquare, Gowalla, Google are all building a database of local listings to provide services. It's a global race to get the data organized. Whoever decides to share this data with everyone else will facilitate the creation of thousands of more companies/services.
2) Mapping companies, like Micello, are only focusing on providing maps for specific venues (extremely hyperlocal). If these maps are provided for others, we'll see a new wave of innovation.
Posted by: John Macon | April 26, 2010 6:50 PM

Faultlines: Vital signs for hospital libraries

2010-03-18T00:05:00.001-04:00

If you have not read the Vital Pathways report, out in the October 2009 issue of JMLA, I recommend it. This symposium, published as a group of articles, is the outcome of an initiative begun by the former MLA president MJ Tooey, in responding to numerous reports of hospital library closings, budget cuts, and job losses.

I had been anxiously anticipating it, because I was not able to find much on the status of hospital libraries, and for my dissertation research proposal, focused as it is on hospital librarians, an understanding of who we are seems important.

Following an unsuccessful attempt, just now, to find something - almost anything! - on a blog, from MLA, published, pre-published, scrawled on a wall somewhere, I report to you that I am underwhelmed by the voluminous reaction of the hospital and medical library community to this important report.

We've all always been vulnerable to economic vagaries. Reports from an earlier survey cite “major negative changes” (Ben Shir, 1989) that included budget cuts or layoffs (37%), downsizing (6%) and budget or hiring freezes (4%) at a time when managed care brought about increased competition for the healthcare dollar.

In Vital Pathways, once again, we have faultlines: the rate of library closings doubled during the years 2007-2009 (a change from 10% - 22% of respondents reporting this, and 23% - nearly a full quarter of of the 127 libraries involved - reported staff downsizing. No clue here about whether these numbers are in any way representative, and no real way to become any less clueless, which I find incredibly weird.

I seem to always end with questions, so here are more: Does the Vital Pathways report pose questions that need to be asked, or that we're interested in asking (or attempting to answer)? Are our only answers 'change or die'? Is the hospital library our own Atlantis? (I know - too much drama in that last!) Are we emulating healthcare itself, in that certain pieces of information are left unshared, a matter of mystique, a proprietary act of legerdemain? I have seen no discussion about it all, post Report - it's as if we are holding our breaths. Probably, we're all too busy book-taping the fort together, getting through.

From Carla Funk, on Medlib-L, in response to a question about how many hospitals have medical libraries:

It is estimated that there were between 5,795 (AHA) and 6,224
(Directory) hospitals in the U.S. in 2004/2005 based on AHA data and information in the Directory of Hospital Personnel, 2005 edition. According to the AHA, there were 6,853 registered hospitals in the U.S. in January 1990, a decline of 15.5% from the 2004 figure. It is further estimated that there were between 1,950 (NN/LM) and 2,513 hospital libraries (Directory of Hospital Personnel) in 2004/2005. According to the AHA, it is estimated that there were 3,030 hospital libraries in 1990. Therefore, comparing this figure to the 2004/2005 data, it is estimated that the number of hospital libraries has declined between 17.1% and 35.7% between 1990 and 2004/2005.

Among other responses in the topic summary:

"I have been trying to track this information for the past 19 years with absolutely no credible success."

More questions: why is this information nearly inaccessible - to the extent that it took several years to gather the information about library changes through the MLANet site? Where is information about non-members of MLA (and why they are non-members), our brethren (sistern?)?

Hmmph. For a profession reliant upon data, etc. etc. Is this our way forward?

Ben-Shir, R.H. (1989, August). Survey confirms major changes in hospital libraries. MLA News, 217:8.

Funk, C. (2008, June 3). Response to topic on Medlib-L "SUMMARY: Percentage of hospitals with Medical Librarians. Retrieved from Medlib-L archives March 16, 2010.

Tectonic shift?

2009-09-26T23:07:00.009-04:00

Tectonic reconstruction of the earth's land masses.
Image copied from Wikimedia.

I know, it's been a while. I'm in the middle of comps (exams), in the middle of teaching. You know how it gets.

The economy, hopes and plans, and the reality

I sometimes hang out on a web forum for vegans (yes, I am, for two years now, and change). It was interesting to realize that a number of the forum members are new librarians, or are in school for their MLS, or are planning to become librarians. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised - after all, it's the fabulous, liberal, wide-awake and engaged personalities of some librarians I met that helped convince me to enter the profession. Several women, in particular: Mary ____ (last name lost in the mists of uncertain memory), business librarian at Peoria Public - bright, funny, something of a hippy. Joanne Fought, now retired, and my mentor/advisor at Illinois Central College, where I began my college education as an older student - a yoga teacher, writer, and all-round support during a difficult time of my life. But I digress. As usual.

Inevitably the topic came up: the economy. Someone posted the news piece about public libraries closing in Philadelphia, and I read responses, chimed in myself. ALA has let her down, wrote one - she'd been misled by claims of all those jobs, just waiting out there, and now - nothing. Friends who graduated in '07 had found employment, but just months later - nothing was available. One had been told a job was waiting after she graduated, by a library director she worked with as an intern. But guess what? The economy crashed with the force of a tsunami, leaving ALA marketing text unchanged, casting those waiting by to fill jobs adrift (all those thousands of graying librarians!) - jobs that suddenly vanished, or that have failed to be vacated.

My fundamental optimism cannot accept this change as a permanent thing. But what do library educators tell hopeful students (what do I?) If we are to be open about our profession, and to invite new minds, new ideas - this too is our reality. Uncertainty is part of our reality. Are we all caught unaware, and hoping that before anyone really notices, things will return to 'normal'? I feel a shift.

The shifting meaning of librarianship

There is a connection here. Today, via my feed reader, I was able to read an article on technology in academic libraries that has briefly been made available by open access. The piece is by researcher Derek Law:

Academic Digital Libraries of the Future: An Environment Scan. New Review of Academic Librarianship, April 2009.
abstract: Libraries are attempting to face a future in which almost every fixed point has disappeared. Users are changing; content is changing; research is taking new forms. Indeed the very need for libraries is being questioned in some quarters. This paper explores the nature of the changes and challenges facing higher education libraries and suggests key areas of strength and core activities which should be exploited to secure their future.

Full text available here (if that doesn't work, here's the page link). I found out about this because of my Google Reader feed from iLibrarian.

It's not just academic libraries (see also: ref to closing public libraries). This is happening now, but it's not happening in a vaccuum. I feel as if we need to think, together, about our direction, and to figure out ways we can provide mentorship to aspirant librarians even in this dismal economy, and help to bridge the gap, even for those who are (despairing) looking, and not finding, library jobs.

Perhaps our social networking capabilities, all this web 2, 3, and onward, means something broader here, or could. Connections, open discourse, brainstorming. We have minds fresh from their educational experience - and we need them now. What can we give, and share? I read the embittered words of those young librarians, who feel fooled, and wanted to call out - Don't turn away!

"The bad news - you're bleeding to death. The good news - the bleeding is slowing down..."

2009-08-07T11:24:00.011-04:00

"Today's NYTimes: 247,000 Jobs Lost in July; Rate Falls Slightly"

A rambling rejoinder to the post at StanleyK, and a revisit to a comment I made here, earlier. The call is out: We need to step up, more than ever, support our communities... but our budgets are being slashed (again).

A friend of mine working at a library system headquarters in Illinois is now performing the duties of 1.5 people, officially, and has been for the past 6 months. A hospital library at a top-rated med center has seen their budget bleed away in response to dwindling patron visits; 5 years and more of no-growth budgets or budget cuts. They've lost a whole floor's worth of space, and staff. Even before this hard time, we librarians have learned to do with less, do without, to swim with whatever the current fiscal realities may be (as if we ever had a choice, right?) We can justly take pride in our endless creativity, and so can educators, particularly those in public schools.

However, such effortful redefining of our services comes at a price, or it must - I cannot imagine it does not. I have written here before about the need to consider our own practices, to focus on yet another underserved population: librarians. Our discussions rightly focus on those we serve, but they seldom take an inward view, to consider how we might support our own continued development (oh, us? - we'll get through). Oh, yes, we will. Diminished, if we are forced again to scale back services; teaching those (fewer) who hope to join the profession about the hard realities. For the practitioner, such realities may include the reinforcement of an often referenced gap between research and practice.

Give me a minute with this.

Editors and educators have deplored the lack of use of research in practice. The imbalance between academic and practitioner authors in our top journals has been measured, with some calling for practitioners to contribute their 'fair share' (1), while more recently, there has been an attempt to fit the model for evidence-based practice (EBP) to librarianship (EBL).

In articles calling for EBL, barriers to the use and practice of research in practice settings have been recognized again and again: lack of support. lack of education. lack of resources. lack of time. and so forth.

Right. So, back to the original topic of this post, and an attempt to tie it all up in a messy and undocumented bow: these things will not seep from the wellsprings of some unseen good place, and they cannot be wrested from shrinking budgets. My fear is not only that we will continue to fail to recognize our own needs, but that if they continue to be unrecognized, our own profession will diminish before our eyes. Perhaps you think I am making the assumption that EBL is the savior of librarianship, but I'd like to assure you this is not the case. There is a recognition that change is occurring - the aging of the profession, the derelict budgets, and so forth. We wonder about what it all means... and still, we do not regard our own selves and practices very closely. If we are to reconsider practice, we need to reconsider practitioner education; if we are to do that, we need (I argue) to understand more about ourselves.

And this is what we, as enablers of information access for all the world, have not done. If you doubt me - do a search for this topic: the information behavior of librarians. The discussion among us should not be limited to how we can continue to provide service in the face of shrinking budgets, but should also involve how we can change and grow, and more than ever - how we can encourage those who may wish to join us to add their voices to the discussion.

(1) Landwirth, T. K. (1990). Your fair share. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 78(1), 69-70.

Sometimes you feel like a flame...

2009-08-01T09:34:00.010-04:00

Yesterday on a listserv devoted to LIS education, something notable happened. Now, it's not unusual for little flame wars to spring up on this discussion list, or for some of the same individuals to fan small blazes until they die away from lack of oxygen, witnessed by silent bystanders.

In this case, the incipient struggle may be over whether the discussion list is unfairly censored (though this was unclear, and remains so); a whole new list (it turns out) has been started as a direct reaction to the perception of censorship. It is ironic that the list is named after Stanley Kunitz, whose poetry is so transparent and responsive, so human:

It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it's done.
(from Touch Me)

I find irony in all the unsaid words, the near-palpable suppression among us that emerges in these sudden, single flames. Are others witnessing this discussion (and others), thinking whole libraries' worth of thoughts, but not saying them aloud (because, why bother - or, how would my response be perceived - a learned constraint?) In this instance, what really is happening?

I find irony in the situation due to my own circumstance, as well. Planning for my dissertation work, I have thought any number of times about how much I'd love to have a discussion with others in my profession about the issues involved. There are so many to be discussed, but in my case I think: how would it be perceived? I think: who will see this? I think: are people interested, even? - and so don't post about it. I find no real platform for this discussion, but perhaps my own perceptions are off-kilter. Still, my concern about perceptions is a functional constraint against action.

One of the discussions I'd really like to have concerns a link that was also posted on the list, to an opinion piece done by a professor who made a number of assumptions about practitioners and on-the-job training. I can only assume they were assumptions, because the piece was completely devoid of any form of proof that the claims had any validity. We are also not told whether the author has hands-on experience in the setting being discussed, or any direct connection. It's just an opinion - interesting, perhaps even instructive - but curiously empty, and it need not have been. Where the author (in the absence of any research from LIS) might have mentioned research done in other fields, there is no mention, just a blithe (implicit) assurance that the claims made are true... In a profession like ours, where the disparities between libraries of the same type are large enough that it's difficult to make broad claims, the author assumes a problem without proof, then prescribes a solution (also without justification); this is disseminated more broadly and without (public) comment.

I do not want to have this be a rant about one author, one listserv. In the case of the opinion piece, the publishers of the work are equally culpable, and in any case, this sort of thing is astonishingly prevalent, so much so that it's difficult to back up opinions with research -- because the research isn't there.

Even after 20 years in this profession, the whole situation is strange to me. Probably I'm just now noticing something that's been prevalent for a long time. As a member of several web forums unassociated with LIS, I have witnessed discussions about issues like politics or healthcare over a number of years. At some point, the discussion usually gets around to someone saying, 'what's your source?' - or, 'yes, but that source is obviously biased'. Eventually (at least on the one forum, anyway) people become accustomed to providing a link to their source, and exhibit an awareness of bias; it's become a cultural norm. This does not happen often on a listserv populated by highly educated LIS professionals, and I find that to be an ultimate irony.

Because of the lack of substantive discourse backed by evidence, small flames rise and quell themselves; those who speak up subside due to lack of rational discourse; silent witnesses wonder about the sub-rosa politics involved. Each of us, like Stanley K., with only one season to live, reifying a culture of silent witnessing and tacit, undiscussed decision making. Why? Does our fear and distaste of confrontation blind us to a middle ground, where respectful discourse can occur?

Note that there are no citations to validate this post, which is wholly speculative.

Gap-bridging

2009-07-30T20:27:00.009-04:00

Tay Bridge over the Firth of Forth, Scotland.
The image is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

It seems an important thing for me to remember that by predeliction I am a feminist, qualitative, even anthropological researcher, even though I love and respect quantitative methodologies, and (maybe especially because) I am interested in evidence-based practice. I was reminded of that, last evening when talking with my partner about Howard Becker’s Tricks of the Trade. Becker’s text was one assigned by Carole Palmer (at GSLIS, University of Illinois), in a terrific qualitative research methods course, the same one in which I conducted the first research study I had ever done.

In that class, we were asked to write brief essays in response to readings or discussions that we had in class. For example, we might be asked to write (in journals we kept throughout the course) about the role of gender in our research focus, or the role of trust. Our short entries were grist for further discussion, ultimately leading into our approach and even the actual text of the research paper which was the culminating project for the semester. But it was safe, as I said: there was no sense then that what I was writing or talking about was part of my 'permanent record'. I remember feeling so tremendously empowered by Palmer’s conveyed passion (oh, it’s safe to express my own!) about research.

In doing dissertation research, I'm not reinventing the wheel, but summoning so much of what I had acquired over the past seven years and more, from Palmer's class, from my own 20 years of library experience, even from my own life above and around my working life, all of which becomes structurally, elementally (unavoidably) part of my research approach whether I recognize & write about it, or not.

This is at once a positive and a threatening realization: In Palmer's class a safe environment was created where we explored our lives as components of our research. She taught us how to integrate the self, while writing as scholars. After learning how to adopt the impersonal scholarly tone by imitation, her class called for reintegration of one’s experience, challenging positivist assumptions. It was gap-bridging, the brave action of stepping away from the writing I’d seen done in journals, toward something else, still unrealized. Perhaps in my mind, though, I was still more a Masters’ student than scholar; the creation of research was such an exciting exploration! – but the stakes were low. As it had been earlier in my career, as a paraprofessional operating at a professional level, performing beyond expectations meant that in some ways, I was protected from criticism.

Perhaps what I am exploring is the gap that I continue to occupy in so many ways (and maybe librarians just live there), including the spaces between quantitative and qualitative research: my experience as a medical librarian, my understanding and admiration of scientific and medical research in those commendable guidelines for action that comprise evidence-based practice, and the squishier, more human (and more real) aspects of how we understand and implement such guidelines. And the question may be: are these two commensurable?

Some of the works I’ve been reading explore the role of tacit information in practice settings (1), suggesting that the lack of acceptance by some of EBP practices (at least in medical practice) may have to do with the human tendency to prefer local over more authoritative but generic information resources. If it is true for clinicians, might it be equally so for library practitioners? And - further thought - if it is true for practitioners, why not also for researchers?

In fact, the use of a gap as a guiding image turns out to be key. EBL is about bridging a gap between research and practice. Working life is about bridging gaps between private and public selves, realities and expectations. We engage in inquiry all the time, in the form of social discourse, in order to understand and define what we know in terms of those expectations. Being an older student has meant a constant attempt to weigh experience against new information, changing both – and bridging gaps between past identities and new, constantly emergent ones.

(1) Gabbay J & le May A. (2004). Evidence based guidelines or collectively constructed "mindlines?" Ethnographic study of knowledge management in primary care. BMJ, 329: 1013.

Hospital libraries - reflection in response to the Krafty Librarian

2009-06-17T11:40:00.004-04:00

Like so many medical librarians I subscribe to the Krafty Librarian, Michelle's excellent blog. Today she reflects on the sad state of hospital librarians, expressing her concern but also talking about problems she'd seen as a hospital librarian herself.

I'm also a former hospital librarian, and I'd like to take issue with a part of what was said, while agreeing with other of her statements. I too have observed shoddy practices, or libraries and librarians which are little more than collections and their caretakers - not just a 1980s perspective, but something far older that goes back to the earliest years of medical librarianship, when hospital libraries were merely in-house repositories of physicians' own private collections, and the clerical staff hired to take care of them, dragons at the gates.

However, it seems far too simplistic to dismiss this latest loss of funding as the fault of victims who have failed to grow and change with the times. After all, the same can be said of libraries in any other setting. Hospital libraries and librarians are widely diverse, and many have done some very fancy footwork in the past several decades - integrating themselves with resident and medical student objectives; with quality assurance initiatives as Six Sigma consultants; taking the lead on new technologies (like the PDA). Yet Michelle may reflect the sentiment of others in the profession in saying

Now days academic medical libraries are feeling the pinch of the economy and they are being asked to do more with less. How they respond will predict their outcome. If they become complacent or ignore the future issues, they will encounter many of the same problems as hospital libraries and librarians have been dealing with for quite a while.

There is so much more to be said and done here. I do not feel that we can walk away from colleagues (even in print, even for a moment) without taking the time to acknowledge, even to explore and speak out about, their contributions, their tremendous importance - and to ask how we as researchers, faculty, associations - can understand this crisis. Because it is certainly that, and unless we do take the time to understand in more depth, we may inadvertently do injury to the entire profession. Otherwise, it sounds like we've begun to prepare an eulogy Alas poor Yorrick - I knew him well! when in fact, we knew nothing well at all - certainly not whether the actions of a shoddy few have rung the knell for those many who serve so excellently well, and who still are worth our attention and support.

Reading Katz (and others)

2009-05-26T06:45:00.015-04:00

An interesting discourse, this! Katz(1) says (speaking, presumably, to physicians) that 'you already think as a clinical epidemiologist' - while others claim that the 'mindlines' of clinical decision making are such that asking clinicians to switch to evidence-based patterns is unrealistic, a lost cause. Which is it? - or does this perspective mirror the theory/practice divide embodied by the debates over EBM?

What Katz says makes sense to me: I believe he is working to effect a switch in resource selection from internal to external, from instinctual to awareness (not necessarily exclusion) of bias. He claims that clinicians instinctively employ probability, using contextual awareness as an example. Working at a pediatric clinic, one makes certain assumptions about the population that figure into diagnostic processes: certain illnesses far more common to the elderly are almost automatically excluded from consideration. When examining a male, pregnancy is not a consideration.

In contrast, Gabbay & le May(2) argue that EBM does not reflect the needs or practices of physicians because they find near-complete satisfaction in their use of local expertise, more often relying upon that authority, seldom venturing beyond it. Wenger(3) agrees, saying that the “social and contextual nature” of knowledge, including local authority and political realities is not acknowledged by EBM (making the initiative inadequate to answer the needs of clinicians).

So, which is it? Are the two incommensurate, hence proving the claim of Sackett, et al. that EBM really IS a paradigm shift?

More later on this, I am sure.

1. Katz, DL. Clinical Epidemiology & Evidence-based Medicine: Fundamental Principles of Clinical Reasoning & Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001.
This is a very readable book, by the way. Highly recommended for non physicians who'd like to understand more about clinical decision making (from this perspective).

2. Gabbay, J., & le May, A. (2004). Evidence based guidelines or collectively constructed "mindlines?" An ethnographic study of knowledge management in primary care. BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), 329(7473), 1013.

3. Wenger, E. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning & Identity. Campbridge: Campbridge University Press, 1998.

Don't look up, and time passes swiftly by

2009-05-18T07:32:00.018-04:00

Pay attention elsewhere, quite intensely, and minutes (hours, days, weeks) tiptoe fleetly past, leaving small tracks on your calendar. What was I gazing at? - I think I've been lost in words and thought, trying to achieve a cohesive sense of the terrain of my research. As I deepen my understanding, the landscape appears to shift, to develop fissures; rivulets wind away in new directions, and even the ground of my belief shifts. But so much of it is information that's not new to me - the difference is that I appear to be gaining a different perspective.

Paul Starr writes engagingly (and winningly, having garnered both a Pulitzer and Bancroft prize for his work) about the Social Transformation of American Medicine, tracing our path from an early reliance upon the individual, to authority vested in the physician and institutions. While I'd been aware of this history, and the struggle for power, it is instructive to consider it through the lens of evidence-based practice.

Think for a moment about this question: Could evidence-based practice in medicine be another permutation of the long struggle between different societal entities (private citizens, individual physicians, groups, etc.) for viability?

The tendency, unsurprisingly, has been to reinforce authority. Early on, the private citizen was responsible for their well being. While there were health practitioners prior to the 1910 Flexner Report, their authority was far from certain. Whether due to a lack of even marginally standardized education, networking, and a lack of technology, medics did not then hold the status and wealth they've had in more recent decades, and nor did their professional organizations wield such tremendous power.

But that authority is not absolute even today: Witness reports about the use of CAMs (and think how long it took to begin research on their efficacy), or the reaction, a decade back, of some physicians to patient-provided printouts; consider the dissatisfaction of many doctors in increasingly curtailed practice, and public discourses about trust (such as all those alarmist media reports entitled 10 Things your doctor may not ask you (and how it could shorten your life!)). I mean to say that physicians do not have absolute control over their professional destinies, and are subject to external pressures. Some might even say they are embattled.

Now, with this, and perhaps longer lasting, we have epistemological* tug-of-war: what is truth, illness, wellness? Who has the power to define these things? And beyond these questions:

What are the implications of this - and does an understanding of this issue enhance our view of EBM?
What elements of these issues might also be found in EBL?

I have been paying some attention to the first question, with several synapses occasionally linking to the second. Looking at EBM in any depth, it's impossible to prevent myself from also considering how the model has been adopted for LIS, and for other professions. In each, there's been struggle. I consider whether my understanding has been reductive, to the extent that I characterized opponents as wrong-headed, ill-informed. Following one of those rivulets of thought, I found a keynote address entitled 'The Politics of Evidence' published in the journal Qualitative Health Research (16:3, 2006, 395-), and began to consider the issues differently than I had. The author, Janice Morse, refers to Archie Cochrane, who identified randomized controlled trials as the pinnacle of research quality, and 'mere opinion' as of no value whatsoever. Morse claims that Cochrane had intended this classification for use with pharmacological trials only, but that EBM pioneers adopted the idea, stretching it far beyond the intended application. Sackett's 1993 standards for quality of evidence** give a grade of C to levels 3, 4, and 5 in research, which are called unsuitable for use as evidence:

Level III: non-randomized to group concurrent cohort comparison
level IV: no comparison group
level V: opinions of expert committees.

By this ranking, claims Morse, qualitative research is classified as grade C, and effectively ignored until very recently:

"But my major concern is that disciplines that were the primary users of qualitative inquiry with a mandate for health work virtually excluded from the resources provided for medical research. That is, research from disciplines such as nursing, rehabilitation, occupational therapy, counseling social work, and the humanistic specialties in medicine, such as family practice and psychiatry, became less credible" (Morse, 397).

I think it may have been this paragraph that affected me most deeply, perhaps because (as I'd said before) I am constantly thinking about contrast between EBM and EBL. I am still thinking about it. If we borrow the structure for EBL from EBM, what legacy of thought might we also be acquiring? I have seen no discussion of epistemological concerns for LIS in the implementation of evidence-based practice, but I have seen literature in healthcare sociology journals about variant sources of knowledge - including tacit. Rather than identifying 'tacit' simplistically as the known, I like Polanyi's distinction between tacit knowledge as knowing how ('embodied') and explicit knowledge as knowing what ('embrained').*** (sorry about all these stars!) To quote Morse, "Tacit knowledge is intuitive, acquired through practical experience and as such, is personal and contextual and cannot be readily made explicit or formalised" (184).

To extend this discussion, I'd like to remind the reader (or myself, at least) that concerns about the use of research in LIS and elsewhere have often centered around individual practitioners' lack of use of published, quality information, preferring to consult with peers. I say this with no lessened awareness of the problems of bias and currency inherent with 'expert advice.'

I had earlier read Gabbay and le May (2004****) on 'guidelines or collectively constructed "mindlines,"' and honestly did not think much of that study, which appeared to me to fall into the opposing camp of 'EBM as thief of autonomy.' In this work the authors found that clinicians seldom consult the medical literature relying instead on local channels of information. in my own mind, I had classified the study among a small group I'd use to depict a sort of 'state-of-the-art' for EBM. My thought was that after all these years of effort, the model for EBM was not being adopted by these recalcitrant clinicians, and and so, knowledge translation had become a new focus, another way to bring about change that must be inevitable. Mind you, I am not saying that EBM should be discarded -- far from it! -- just that my own understanding is changed, and that I will bring these thoughts to my inquiries.

* Epistemology is one of those words I have had to look up more than once, because for some reason the definition will not stay resident (I know, mind like a steel trap, eh). It's the study of knowledge, and is concerned with how knowledge is acquired.
** Sackett DL. (1993). Rules of evidence and clinical recommendations. Canadian Journal of Cardiology, 9(6):487-489.
*** Polanyi M. The tacit dimension, Peter Smith, Gloucester, MA (1966/1983).
**** Gabbay J & le May A. (2004, Oct. 30). Evidence-based guidelines or collectively constructed "mindlines?" Ethnographic study of knowledge management in primary care. BMJ, 329:1013-.

Talk about questions..!

2009-03-22T09:19:00.013-04:00

I'm looking through association statements about research in librarianship, so this morning I note the following, from an 1998 ACRL report entitled Academic Librarianship and the Redefining Scholarship Project: A Report from the Association of College and Research Libraries Task Force on Institutional Priorities and Faculty Rewards (the highlighting in red and footnotes are mine):

Scholarship
As previously noted, a major proportion of the work done by librarians (1) qualifies as scholarship.

Inquiry
Librarians have applied a wide range of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies in advancing the discipline's knowledge base. They engage in the scholarship of inquiry in order to apply their findings to the everyday challenges of providing library services (2). Especially important areas of inquiry for librarians include:

conducting citation studies (3);
analyzing how people seek and use information;
constructing means for organizing bodies of data and information, and designing methods for precise and efficient information retrieval;
establishing methods for evaluating the effectiveness of library services and processes;
researching the effects of environment and library practices on the "life span" of the various information media found in libraries;
discovering the communication modes and related factors that lead to the most effective reference interview, one that has the best chance of determining any given user's precise information needs;
preparing analytical bibliographies;
investigating the history of the book and recorded knowledge.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) I wonder if this assumes 'academic' and not all librarians. I also am wondering if this statement is not one intended more as motivation, as opposed to being a reflection on the actual state of our work. Argh - there is no reference here to 'previous' notations.

(2) What's assumed here - the role of 'librarians' as academic researchers, or even academic librarians as academic researchers? How are academic librarians doing it right (and non-academic librarians, not), if this statement is actually true?

(3) This makes me wonder why we have not already developed some kind of tool for the evaluation of our work, if it's so focused on citation analysis!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From an earlier section of the same document:

In "Making a Place for the New American Scholar," Eugene Rice describes Ernest Boyer's Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate as having "called on faculty to move beyond the tired old 'teaching vs. research' debate . . . What moves to the foreground is the scholarly work of faculty, whether they are engaged in the advancing of knowledge in a field, integrating knowledge through the structuring of a curriculum, transforming knowledge through the challenging intellectual work involved in teaching and facilitating learning, or applying knowledge to a compelling problem in the community."(2) These four types of scholarship, which we shall call inquiry, integration, teaching, and application, provide a framework for considering how the activities of academic librarians may fit into the broader, more complete understanding of what constitutes academic work(1). Such a reexamination is very timely in light of the similar efforts being carried out in the Institutional Priorities and Faculty Rewards project by dozens of other professional associations on behalf of their academic disciplines.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) I understand this to be an attempt to categorize academic library 'scholarship' as a broad concept, with 'research' (here called 'inquiry') as a sub-category. How does this affect the model for EBL, where inquiry (the 'important questions for the profession,' to paraphrase Andrew Booth*) is intended as the driver, with integration encapsulating all the other aspects of application, including teaching and evaluation of outcomes?

* Booth A. (2006). Clear and present questions : formulating questions for evidence based practice. Library Hi Tech, 24(3):355-368.

All the classics: Bless me, EBLIP, for I have sinned

2009-03-21T18:58:00.006-04:00

In school, during one of my first library courses at the Master's level, we were made to digest huge chunks of LIS classical research. Not just inches, but several feet of tree-killing articles were discussed, then quarterly a huge auditorium-full of students (160 of us!) took open-book tests that entailed answering large questions with reference to these works. We'd all carry this with us, indexed and tabbed, boxed and annotated, beginning the process of building a scholarly scoliosis along with strained eyes.

As an aside, I never will forget the wonderful feeling of finding myself among so many peers. It was like a lightning-jolt, after years of working in small libraries, a paraprofessional who'd never attended a single library conference.

Today I am teaching (and continuing to learn) about critical evaluation of the LIS literature. I know I'd needed to be familiar with all those works (so many of them stay in my mind, foundation to our practice), but I wonder if in some ways, this method of teaching did not also work to reinforce a practice that is simultaneously entirely human - and a shameful little secret.

Oh, we know (right?) that barriers to research in LIS include the lack of time, support, research training, perception of applicability. All the surveys agree, and it's true, I'm sure. But I also know (I confess here in this private place) that another barrier for me was ignorance and maybe a sort of intellectual apathy, the well-entrenched habit of digesting huge chunks of information as if they were unquestionable, in just the way I've described, or in response to an immediate need. It's how I was taught to be. Or rather, I feel as if I was told to be critical, but in practice, there was no time or space for criticism to occur, and the reality of my whole working life had to do with paying attention to politics in one form or another.

How do we get to a place where we can learn (or realize a need to learn)? I knew 'real research' was out there, vaguely, but felt that place across the chasm I sensed had no real connection to me. In fact, I did not often have access to our literature, other than current issues of a number of library journals (Computers in Libraries, JMLA, Library Technology). I'd scan tables of contents, copy some for later reading, then cross my initials off and send the journal on its way to the next staff member. When I read something it was of practical use to a problem I'd been confronting - usually programmatic accounts, 'how I done it good.'

Feeling myself a stranger to 'big R Research,' intimidated by statistics and fancy, terminology-laden graphs, I have in the past decided that the authors must have proven their hypothesis because it did, it surely did, appear that they knew what they were doing. So writing a paper in school, or (earlier, much earlier) reading about how another library made their bindery decisions, I seldom questioned anything but the potential application of the author's findings; the literature as a manual for practice, our sharing in the most natural way.

After all, it seems we seek first to find information from our peers, and even physicians report doing so. This other way of inquiry (research) comes after all else has been exhausted. And frankly, if for years you've been doing it the first way, and it has worked, why change? In fact, might the suggestion that you've been neglecting a professional responsibility introduce unwelcome guilt, piled atop having too much to do, stacked with the realities of political expedience?

Another thought, maybe a fragment. Reading bibliometric studies as I've been doing, I find so many claims to tracking the research of LIS - compiling and measuring topics, identifying domains, top journals, and even asking what our largest and most compelling questions might be. Undoubtedly these works are key to the future of LIS, and I hope so much to build on their achievements.

However, I wonder who the authors of those measured citations might be (academics, doctoral students, librarians who staff a busy reference desk?), and whether the questions identified might actually come from those who are already choir members, and I want to ask: Which of these reflect the important questions faced by practicing librarians? What is the evidence base for our question lists, our full methodological disclosure, our earnest owning-up to the assumptions and weaknesses of our work?

Does research mean something different to the practitioner than to the researcher? Do publications authored by practitioners reflect practice-oriented questions (and what percentage)? How well do the research trends mirror all our professional concerns? - that, I do not know, and may never know. I may not find out by reading the literature.

Speaking of classical LIS research, I wonder if Gloria Leckie's findings are equally applicable to our own profession, and if so, how we might know. Remember her work, tracing the assumptions of experts about novice understandings, where the experts dwelt in a universe of information surrounding their topic - speaking a different language, and leaving the novice to feel judged, inadequate, a gaping chasm uncovered? I read that and felt aware as I had not before, and carried that new thought to my teaching with library patrons. I nodded sagely and thought about all those teachers who'd sent their hapless students to the public library to ask for '50 facts' (no lie - this happens).

I never wondered 'til now if this is equally applicable to our profession, to the assumptions made by researchers, and to the sense of being inadequate, judged, separate, on the part of practitioners in the face of earnest lectures: Go forth, practitioner, and sin no more with shoddy decision support.

Leckie, G. J. (1996). Desperately seeking citations: Uncovering faculty assumptions about the undergraduate research process. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 22 (3): 201-8.

Update on the bibliometric evaluation tool!

2009-03-05T12:29:00.006-05:00

Thanks so much to Lorie Kloda, editor of the EBLIP journal Evidence Summaries section, who asked her colleague, an expert in bibliometric research, to comment. Changes recommended by Vincent Larivière have been made, particularly concerning statistical evaluation.

New evaluation tool

Evaluation of research

2009-03-01T12:55:00.009-05:00

You may have read here that in our class, we're practicing critical evaluation of published LIS research by using the 'toolbox' provided to those who write evidence summaries for the online journal, Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. This semester we've examined two bibliometric articles, and all have noted that the existing tools appear to be inadequate for the evaluation of this sort of research. This is surprising to me, because while it's a methodology (or series of methodologies) most often used by those in our profession, we are not alone by any means in tracking publication trends, exploring issues associated with the use of provided journal studies (e.g., JCR) for promotion and tenure, and more. Short of a critical instrument for the evaluation of a systematic review, what's out there?

I imagine something like this would help us in a number of ways. A key question is: Is there a standard 'best practice' for the conduct of a bibliometric research study? From there, of course, we can ask whether a given work meets the standards - and on the heels of that, ask whether findings or methodologies (even flawed ones) can be used in another setting. I have seen nothing like this. With that in mind, I took notes this semester and last, and I've got a (beta!) question set that I plan to use for evaluation. If you're interested, I'd love feedback (and if you do know of something out there that's already in use - please let me know!). PDF here.

This must be what's called a cognitive ferment, or maybe it's just chaos

2009-02-09T09:46:00.007-05:00

Right - so that phrase has likely not existed 'til now. Well, it's how I'm feeling.

Last week, I spoke in Washington, DC, at the preconference for the American Association of Publishers' annual meeting, as part of a panel on Second Life. The whole preconference centered on a theme of 'Mashup at the Library,' exploring various iterations of new thought and uses of technologies - for publication, data mining, inquiries into new-gen undergraduate information behavior, and more.

On that last, Vicki Burns, Department Head and Anthropology and Health & Society Librarian, Rush Rhees Reference, University of Rochester, spoke about the fantastic study that library underwent in order to understand and incorporate the needs and preferences of students. First, it blew me away that the library employed an anthropologist to do the study, which was funded by IMLS.

I'd also spoken recently with Joanne Marshall, my adviser & dissertation chair, about a focus for my research. I want to learn about librarians' information behaviors in the workplace, specifically those around administrative decision making. Originally I'd intended to expand on previous research investigating whether we can reliably retrieve our own literature from the LISA database.

But I had the realization that I couldn't sustain the assumption I had made in doing this research that we are actually using the database to find evidence in support of practice, or that we even use research literature, driving me to look earlier along the information path, to our information behaviors. The LISA study (and my research re-focus) began after I'd observed the frequent use of surveys on the Medlib-L listserv, after all - an informal, peer-based decision support practice.

From what I have been reading on the evidence-based initiatives in medicine, nursing, social work, and other disciplines, there have been realizations that translational work is needed to enable practitioners to use research findings. From my own perspective, this understanding should be achieved early on, by asking what do we do (a la Dervin)?

So I had thought, rather vaguely, not paying overmuch mind to the issue while slogging through the rest of my lit review, about the how and who of my actual research. I have been impressed by the sensemaking time-line interview methodology used by Brenda Dervin ever since I'd read 'In moments of concern.' In this work, Dervin leads respondents through stepwise reconstruction of their thought and action processes at a time they'd sensed an information need. It was intended as a thoroughly grounded approach, and while it was prone to human recall failure, the apparent ability of the methodology to capture individual sensemaking struck me then as a valuable tool - far richer than a survey or an inquiry about resources used.

It is difficult for me to set aside the potential for generalizability in favor of richer data, but that's what happens with the sensemaking methodology. I'd need to select respondents (n=maybe 5 or so? one from each domain of practice?) from one or more settings. Questions sprang up insistently about that, particularly with regard to the various domains of practice, but also the type of library. Having decided on health librarians, wouldn't a focus on the academic library setting provide very different contexts from a hospital library? How might the the decision making differ in the two contexts? I consider this, knowing from experience that even in two different hospital libraries, there are few parallels due to the wild variables of politics, funding, administrative support, individual skills and experiences, and so many more.

Joanne had suggested I think about using case studies, thinking of the ones I'd done during my time at the Duke University Medical Center Library. There, I'd looked at three different projects, participating in two and examining one in retrospect. I had been given complete access to the files, plus added interviews of workgroup members, and in the case of the two current projects, participated as a member of the workgroup. My active role in these projects affected decision making, but that doesn't concern me - I do find it of interest to consider the process overall. How might sensemaking be applied to this project planning process? Paul Solomon has done so...

Dervin, B., Harpring, J., & Foreman-Wernet, L. (1999). In moments of concern: A Sense-Making study of pregnant, drug-addicted women and their information needs. The Electronic Journal of Communication [On-line serial] 9 (2, 3, & 4).

Solomon, P. (1997). Discovering information behavior in sense making: I. Time and timing. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(12), 1097-1108.
-- II. The social. 1109-1126.
-- III. The person. 1127-1138.

Becoming a Colleague

2009-01-11T10:26:00.011-05:00

Becoming Colleagues: The experiences of doctoral research fellows in practice settings is the title to a poster created by my friend and colleague, Lonelyss Charles, and me in preparation for ALISE. I can't tell you how tough this was to create (well, of course I can, isn't that what I'm doing now?) But it was and is tough (interesting, challenging!) to talk about the experience, perhaps because it's not fully processed yet. Writing this helps.

In truth, I cannot consider the processes of simultaneously acclimating to the fellowship and to the PhD program as discrete issues, separate from the topic of evidence-based practice. When I write about librarianship, I am writing about me and everyone I know, not a distant place, or faceless people. I write about research as I conduct research, and I write about librarianship as I practice it. This could either constitute navel-gazing or it could be of real value... maybe it's both.

I had begun my fellowship intending to enlarge on a study I'd done while still at the U of I (Urbana), very much in the area of consumer health. It was that work, which claimed my sanity and imagination and showed me the limits of my intellect, that drove me to apply to PhD programs. I had come to UNC fully expecting to follow that path.

But several things happened to change that. I was encouraged to apply for the TRLN Fellowship, an opportunity to be mentored by Carol Jenkins and Pat Thibodeau, both former presidents of MLA. As a person who has wended my way by slow boat to professional status, I had never been an MLA member. I reached for the PhD to find an environment where peers were engaged, excited about research and teaching and mentorship. Perhaps you can imagine how it felt, then, to have this opportunity! And so, I accepted the Fellowship, and right away began to spend time at both the UNC Health Sciences Library and Duke University Medical Library.

Changes were occurring internally at that point, as well. First, I was a new PhD student, trying to get used to the fact that SILS faculty regarded me differently now, and also trying to understand that where I'd always been (all my career!) a paraprofessional who performed beyond my job description, now I was going to be judged at a different and more rigorous level. Second, I remember thinking that the libraries would be my home places, the spaces where I would feel most at ease, while I adjusted to the changed academic expectations.

I want to take a moment to point out that I was trying to bridge gaps between my former professional identity and this new one, which I was not yet able to envision. As well, I learned that I would - in a very personal and daily manner - have to bridge the spaces between academic and practice environments, as I attempted to understand what it meant to do research in a practice setting.

While at the University of Illinois, I began another boundary-blurring, which was to try to reconcile what I'd known about research before (very little) with the mostly positivist and quantitative methodologies of medicine - with this new-to-me idea of feminist, qualitative inquiry. I was instinctively drawn to this latter, but I do sense the dichotomy that may dwell at the heart of our profession. We need to bridge the gap but don't yet know quite how.

I'll take another moment to observe that EBL itself, of course, is about gap-bridging, between research and practice, between theory and application. And also to say that the aim of the TRLN Fellowship program is itself to bridge this space.

When in the past I taught one-on-one, I felt as if I had my antennae set to high, 'listening' for the person's hesitation, with a hyperalert sense of their comfort and trust and understanding. I felt this way at the libraries, too. I was listening to sub-rosa sensations, unsure whether they emanated from my internal sensations, or from the environments.

In the libraries now, as a Fellow, I found I knew all the language used, and the landscape - but there was a profound shift in relations between myself and the library staff at each location. I was surprised, felt myself unbalanced, more at ease at the library school. I found myself thinking of Lofland* and Rosaldo** and their ethnographic exploration of settings, with all the questions I'd learned to ask about trust and access ringing in my ears, suddenly.

There was no prescribed plan of action for my work at the libraries. This was a new experience for all of us. So we negotiated to find a project that would suit my interests and the needs of the library. Right away, enlarging on a completely academic study (working with a web-based health support forum to inquire about health related decision making and peer support) was not going to work. We decided I would try to gain a 'snapshot' of consumer health resources and planning at the libraries, with the intention that this would form a basis for administrative decisions.

I have learned a lot from that experience about knowledge management and the impossibility of understanding institutional programs by examining archived information. I'm laughing here, a bit - listen, if you don't quite get the need for KM, just spend some months trying to reconstruct anything more complex from archived files! You will find yourself greatly sensitized to gaps and with a far greater appreciation for the problems associated with knowledge capture.

I did achieve something with this project, and along with it, I had the realization that I couldn't really see myself doing a dissertation on consumer health from an administrative perspective. It's not where I live as a researcher. I have a business degree, and have a great appreciation for KM (more now, as I said!) but this is not, I realized, what I wanted to do. Right then, and I remember a lunchtime discussion with Margaret Moore, director of planning for UNC HSL where this seismic shift occurred - I turned my attention to another of my strong interests, evidence-based practice in libraries.

Everything began to fall in place for me then. I will never lose my interest in consumer health, and in fact, I'm still working in this area in Second Life (though I am not doing what I think of as 'big R' research there, yet).

The poster is a - it's one pixel of a larger image that is taking slow shape in my mind. It's part of my own path, but I think I see all this in some way indicative of important aspects of our profession. Identity, access, trust, culture; gap-bridging, sensemaking, discursive and reflective. Changing, finding balance.

* Lofland, John. Analyzing social settings : a guide to qualitative observation and analysis. Belmont, Calif. : Wadsworth, 2006.
** Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The remaking of social analysis. Boston : Beacon Press, 1993.

Teaching EBL, part 2

2008-12-20T06:13:00.003-05:00

I begin where I left off, and will hopefully move forward. I ended my last posting by asking whether we even understand librarians' information behavior, and that this question has led me to a reworking of the syllabus and my own dissertation research question.

In syllabus creation I find it best to recursively echo objectives, in a progressive, perhaps kaleidoscopic way: how does this look from here? - does this aspect of the model appear to jibe with this new perspective? If a key part of the course objective is "to reflect on the experience and model for EBLIP as a way to bridge the gap between research and practice," assignments and discussions must continually encourage reflection, rather than compliance with the model for practice.

I am thinking this through as I write. With so little known about our practices, does in-class reflection truly serve the purpose of evaluating the model? Or rather, doesn't it ask for individual (or at best, small group) reactions - rather than a more structured approach that also incorporates what is known about the larger population? But if the purpose of EBP is to support the practitioner, and if I am trying to teach individual practitioners (as opposed to teaching researchers who wish to advance their research agendas), perhaps it is the individual and their reflective discourse that is key, so that the objective is bridging the research-practice gap as an individual practitioner.

If this is the case, then the intended take-away for the class might be an individualized toolbox, suited to each participant's area of practice, together with an appreciation for the translational issues within and across areas of practice.

Now, back to a consideration of whether the current syllabus moves us toward that goal. You know what I love? - that in teaching about EBL, I cannot myself avoid the model for its practice. It seems to me that the base and framework and process, the research support and evaluation, also need to be constructed using the best evidence, following the very model I am attempting to disseminate.

Teaching EBL

2008-12-14T14:28:00.016-05:00

I'm working now on the syllabus for the spring's class, offered through WISE, co-taught with Joanne Gard Marshall. Once again it will be completely revised, and this process is one I find so valuable - as a new university-level instructor, as a new researcher myself, and as a librarian.

The first course was a tutorial, with 6 modules. It was begun as the final project for the EBM course taught by Connie Schardt, further refined during a (wonderful, superb) college teaching course I took, and then trialed with a full-semester, Master's level class where the tutorial provided a framework. In the years between my time at the hospital library and now, I had been able to step away from the practice environment, where my focus was wholly on patrons, and toward a deeper understanding of my own long-simmering questions about the what and wherefore and why of LIS practice itself.

So, I stepped away, and began to think about those questions, simultaneously acquiring the critical mindset of a graduate student. I could make jokes here about book learnin'. I looked back, though, with a critical eye, remembering years of practicing by the seat of my pants.

I had to figure out, for example, how to find AV materials for physician CE on the pre-subject searchable OCLC by instinct and practice, or figure out which bindery (and bindery method - fan binding? new glues?) was best and most economical. No guides, no real mentorship early on (I had a director who was scared of computers, and was using the OCLC M300 with one 5 1/4" floppy drive - if I say PC File, do you shudder?), but at the same time, I had an incredible amount of freedom to err and earn my expertise.

I looked back and was shocked at the sheer amount of time wasted, at the slips I made. There is a better way, I became convinced, to do this. Here, from perspective, I wonder if I could have the same perceptions if I had not had such freedom to err. The mentorship that has benefited me so much from the start might have been more akin to Six Sigma training, all focused on the outcomes analysis, with 10% slashed from the top. Would I have felt the same about my work..? I can't tell, any more than I can tell from the inside out what it's like to come to medical librarianship now.

In a way my journey so far has been akin to the confusion many librarians had (myself included) when EBL began to emerge. We felt that EBL must be a way for us to find better information for our patrons. We had (have) trouble distinguishing our more management-oriented practices from those we have worked to perfect in serving our various populations. But of course, EBL is more than that. It is an opportunity to consider our own practices and profession, a way to insert confidence in our decision making through a stepwise approach: ask, search, evaluate, integrate, assess, disseminate - a traceable path to action that can support decisions and provide as near a stable base as possible to our knowledge management for the future.

The tutorial I built early on (I do hopefully return to my point!) reflected my own early understanding of EBL and LIS in general. I had begun with a somewhat unidimensional perception: we don't do enough, don't do what we do, well enough, and we'd best get with the program or we risk losing our professional shirts in the eyes of (more professional) colleagues in other fields, such as healthcare. Tsk tsk. After all, there is the example of EBM to follow, right? I had Olli Miettinen's severe philosophical writings to guide my understanding of the need for a more rigorous practice orientation (1).

And so, my tutorial began with a quick overview of EBM, presenting the shocking idea that in the field of medicine, all that came before is questionable, and only what transpires after the judicious application of the model and methods espoused by EBM has validity. I know, I know - I'm being simplistic here. But this was my springboard to the next module, and the ones that followed, leading participants through a mix of hands-on exercises and theoretical considerations to a more holistic comprehension of the model for LIS.

I still like the progression from concept to application I think I built in, but I also think I knew at the time that it was full of holes. One of them was right in the toe of the sock... I mean, at the business end. Right exactly where you are meant to take the step from question building, searching, evaluating... and then a miracle occurs.
As I began to focus more on EBL as my own research topic, I began to wonder if the gap was not only in my own naive approach, but in the model itself, and in the literature around it. Translation to practice is a ragged hole where the wind blows in. It's not news for social work, and is a concern even for EBM, where recent studies have showed that despite Cochrane, filters, integration into education, the practicing physician continues not to have time to search, is not skilled in the practice of searching, and prefers peer consultation (the 'expert' model EBM was intended to improve upon) as a method of decision support. So now, medicine and other disciplines proceed to focusing on translational research, finding ways to assist the practitioner to apply the findings of rigorous research in practice.

Next, I thought about LIS and how our model emulates EBM. Could we also fall in the same hole? Do we even have an understanding of our own decision making practices, or did we skip over that part? And this sequence of thoughts led to my reworking of the class, which was just taught for the second time as an online course. It also led to my reconsideration of my research question, but that's also a question for another day.

Sidebar thought: Could I have followed the EBL model, back when I conducted a study of bindery methods? Anyway - that's a question for a different day, implicating the then-status of LIS indexing availability, etc.

to be continued

(1) Miettinen OS. (2001, Aug 21). The modern scientific physician: 1. Can practice be science? CMAJ, 165(4):441-2. This is just the first part of an excellent series.

Decisions and revisions

2008-11-25T06:12:00.010-05:00

Do I dare
disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock

Thanks to the economy, more than a dozen schools and programs, including two Ivy League schools and a prominent medical center, have instituted hiring freezes.

Cornell won't hire new faculty members from outside the university through March and has halted all new construction for at least 90 days. At Brown, the president announced a freeze for staff and administrative...
Go, A. (2008, Nov. 7). the paper trail: More schools impose hiring freeze. U.S. News & World Report, from http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail/2008/11/7/more-schools-impose-hiring-freezes-2.html.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

I wonder how many news stories now begin 'In these uncertain times,' or some permutation of that phrase, or how many rest uneasily upon such a base.

This morning I read, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, reference to yet more schools freezing hires (or as one Florida university prefers it, at least a 'heavy frost.' News of a 16% budget cut for Florida is echoed elsewhere, by decisions to do this, or that, to take a coffee spoon's worth from here or there, to melt away through attrition, to halt purchases of materials in the library (and oh, how dolorously familiar it all seems to me after 20 years in libraries, how inextricably downward-spiraling losses must be!)

Reading all this I am driven to look away but cannot. I am haunted by it, by 'what ifs,' thinking about - well, now what do I do? That's the starting point for my thoughts, I admit - me, me, me. And then I think we may all be haunted by ghosts of unemployment lines, of professors selling apples and pencils, times that have shaped the nation and the world.

How has it changed us? If we can point to the Sputnik era as a starting point for upsurges in university hiring, science-focused education from the bottom up, and increases in library budgets - what are we not saying about harder times, and their effects upon these things?

After I get done with these speculations, or set them aside, I think about those subtler things - among them, evidence-based practice. If we know that some of the primary barriers to research in library settings are time and lack of resources, it may follow that in a recession, these commodities will be increasingly more scarce. If there is a heavy frost on hiring at the library (and we all know this math, don't we?) then staff do more with less of both time and resources. It would not be a good time to subscribe to LISA, or to free up just two hours per week for full time staff for research efforts. Add to this that we serve others whose own resources may have shrunk.

There are places my mind does not wish to go with this.

But it seems to me that this is a time when library associations, and the larger university LIS programs, need to lead more strongly. I had heard that once upon a time, MLA offered research mentors (in fact, I know they still do), and that very few people took advantage of this program. This is a time for collaboration, and we are now technologically more capable of boundary-crossings than ever before. In Second Life, more than 1,000 librarians from all types of libraries have been talking - for several years now - about what it means to work in a virtual space. We've been engaged in discovery about one another, and benefiting greatly from that ongoing conversation.

I want to connect the dots here.

We need strong leadership to emerge, and a new focus on collaboration: let's all learn more about how we can help each other through. As we do so, the future will be shaped. We knew it was coming anyway, right? At the same time, there has been much talk about the aging of the profession, and about the need to enlist younger people to carry on as older ones retire. We will welcome them to environments altered by cuts and heavy frosts, and they will arrive with paradigms and perceptions of their own.

Let's talk about how we can offer students new opportunities to practice in settings that range across all types of information environments. Let's invite students to those conversations, so that we begin now to work toward transition in a collaborative mode. Let's attend to new visions, rather than closing out the dark, from fear or our faltering complacency. If EBLIP is about moving from an expert opinion mode toward one that is more transparent, we all (all information environments, all levels) need to be a part of this conversation. Leadership will (or should) belong to those who think about how to build bridges across the boundaries we have created within and between our present-day spaces.

Our universe is (again, again!) disturbed; it is changing with or without our participation. Meanwhile, we have these new voices...

Dregs and bits

2008-11-20T07:43:00.003-05:00

The other day (more days ago than should have been), I posted about evangelism in EBP:

I don't have an answer to that (usually) unvoiced opinion, either. I think I used to have one, but as I find I tend to do over time (must be that maturity thing), I came to a realization that soapbox-standing is not my metier. There is a certain aspect to EBL that is evangelical, so that a certain proportion of research articles and editorials about EBL are about persuasion ('for years editors of leading LIS journals have deplored the quality of practitioner research...') Shouldn't our discourse be about those questions, about our existing practices, about our perceived needs? Otherwise it's selling - not ice in Alaska - but ice someplace where there is no use for it.

Nothing like quoting myself for that certain something-or-other, is there? But I was talking yesterday with Michelle Samplin-Salgado of AIDS.gov, pursuant to our planning for World AIDS Day (see http://www.karunasl.info and http://www.karunasl.info/WorldAIDSDaySL/ for more on this, and our NLM-funded project), and we got around to generalized discussion about how one goes about convincing skeptics of the value of new widgets and practices, in this case, convincing academics and federal health agencies of the usefulness of Second Life for consumer health / public health promotion. I realized this morning while drinking my 2nd cup that this is not really so different from the persuasive tug-and-push of EBLIP, after all.

It is true that I never seem to append my comments about the value of EBL with jokes about wearing pink pig slippers while riding a flaming bike through the sky, but in so many other ways, conveying the value of change seems to entail a certain measure of rah-rah, or, relating it to the recent election, hype and promises of benefits that will - yes! - transform the profession and public perception of it, according us all, finally, with the recognition we so desire. For EBLIP, that's (more) unassailable decisions and less uncertain status within the institutional structure; for Second Life (well, maybe for EBL, as well) room to explore new ways of being.

We have the perception of quality deficits by some, while others feel the old widgets continue to work just fine (seat-of-the-pants practitioners, or authority/expertise based, just as with medicine). We have the kaleidoscopic shift of culture, technology, economy, need, each with its own urgency toward change or stasis; in libraries, these pressures can be threatening to the viability of budgets. Detractors kick back at change for many reasons, and this may be one of them: the rational, self-preserving voice of experience from a library director who knows that no matter what happens in the academy, the hospital administration does not support research, that there is no time or space for risk-taking, that collection decisions are very often more the result of special interest groups (like the neurosurgeons, who insist on those $3,000 subscriptions, or residents' groups, who insist on UpToDate). I'm veering off topic here, but I'm doing it because while writing this, I am thinking it through, and remembering exactly the kind of pressures described, above, in a teaching hospital library in Central Illinois, not all that long ago. I had previously mentioned Pat Thibodeau's half-joke that librarians are anarchists because they focus so intently on serving local populations, and I do think that the pressures described are very real barriers to EBLIP. How, I ponder while drinking all but the dregs of now-cooled coffee, can we help? Is this on the same level as, say, the hushed conversations about pricing deals with publishers?

The United States Election, 2008

2008-11-03T23:01:00.002-05:00

Just a brief comment (a radical departure from my endless text!) and then I will settle, and await, like so many millions of others, the outcome of tomorrow's election. If I could write in a method rather than a candidate, I would elect evidence-based decision making. I would nominate it for its stepwise consideration of pertinent elements, and for its transparency:imagine if policy decision making adhered to rules of disclosure!

Evidence summaries and a culture of criticism

2008-10-23T19:23:00.012-04:00

As always, Thursday afternoon's EBL class sparked off a number of thoughts and questions, exactly as intended. I cannot ask for a better outcome than to do this. Focus of the class was the journal club discussion/critical evaluation of this article:

McKnight S. & Berrington, M. (2008, March). Improving Customer Satisfaction: Changes as a Result of Customer Value Discovery. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 3(1):33-52.

The process we've been using for this core part of the class is to rotate as facilitators, responsible for assigning the use of a particular critical evaluation tool (these being the same ones provided to the EBLIP journal's Evidence Summary team) then leading analysis of an article that was previously chosen. In this case, it was chosen because Joanne Marshall will be talking about Servqual and Libqual next week. The author of this work, however, chose to use a model for user satisfaction imported from marketing. I also frankly wanted to see how an original research article published in the Evidence-based Library and Information Practice journal might fare.

We kept returning to the culture of LIS, and danced as we've done before around the idea and attitude toward criticism of the literature, sensitive to the difficulties many in LIS have to negativity. Some feel that in order to encourage more robust literature, potential contributors should be approached more gently, more positively. An extension of this is the aversion to cultures in some disciplines where criticism involves spiked fingernails or even poisoned sledgehammers, no-holds-barred nastiness in which one (apparently) must engage in order to be taken seriously as a researcher.

It seems undeniably to be the case though, that in LIS generally (how do you like my 'weaselly' words, spoken as a true grad student!), we are averse to, unused to, and even hypersensitive to criticism. Several times, when I've discussed my EBL interests or focus with well-respected LIS professionals (including those with national and even international reputations), they've responded with what I could only term a sort of culturally-entrenched insecurity. "When you talk about EBL," one said, "I feel that I've been doing it wrong, haven't done enough." These administrators do not refrain from conducting research, but if they feel this way - how do others feel?

As an aside, I regard EBL (or some of its tools, though they aren't affiliated with EBL alone) particularly critical evaluation of the literature, to be a cultural tool. One student said yesterday that she will not read research the same way again, after close and organized readings, and creating an 'evidence summary' paper. Setting aside for a moment the question of whether we do read the literature - isn't this changed view of it something we need to be seeking as a profession? We must (I say, climbing once more onto a wellworn soapbox) engage with our own literature, as a community.

How do critical evaluation tools help us to deal with this sensitivity? Shall we decide that if librarians are touchy, tant pis, and move on anyway, kniving sharply with tools meant for different cultures more accustomed to such stern looks - and potentially, deterring cautious attempts by those who are alienated by such an approach?

To think about, here: is the culture from which EBP arises more patriarchal, positivist, despite recent trends toward the integration and evaluation of qualitative research? How might more feminist models find space in our adaptation of the EBP model? For consideration:

Rogerian argument: http://www1.esc.edu/personalfac/hshapiro/professional_communications/advice_outline.htm

The more traditional & patriarchal model: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~digger/305/toulmin_model.spare

Are there studies of the effectiveness of the critical evaluation tools?

In class last Thursday, we used the HCPRDU mixed method tool to evaluate...... and found it utterly cumbersome, with lots of N/A responses to a case study conducted in university libraries. This UK library setting was the setting for a series of workshops, followed by changes in practices, collections, and services. Patrons were surveyed using paired values for both positive and negative aspects of the libraries based on a model intended for use in the marketing sector.

We discuss what questions would be suited for the evaluation of a bibliometric study, a case study. I think about a question set that one might apply to the results of a survey conducted on Medlib-L, or to a 'how I done it' article if, as may frequently be the case, there is a shortage of material.

If with each step you close half the distance to your goal

2008-10-21T18:35:00.006-04:00

- you will never reach it. This simple fact, I always found compelling and a bit discouraging, and as a child I tried to test it by bringing my fingertips closer, closer, closer - and they'd bump. I was incapable of the calibration, and knew it.

In seeking to render research perfectly rigorous, our decisions error- or bias-free, we will never reach that state. How far are we, though? How close might we come, and is the exercise of calibration worth making new tools? In a practice setting, is such an exercise more an expensive waste of time? Don't answer that, or any of these questions.

Or rather, don't answer them generically - do so with each decision, then tell me. I look back, I confess, to 20 years of gut-driven decision making, to marketing in a public library without any knowledge of marketing, surveys conducted with no real idea of what I was doing. In one, a survey about what music patrons might like to see in the circulating collection of a public library, a patron gently pointed out that I'd completely skipped over country music. When I did such things, that I did them at all was viewed as sufficient. No one had time to spend on a more stepwise approach. Everything I learned (or most of it) in library management, supervision, patron services, education - all of it, I learned by trial and error.

I hear older voices, a little amused, whispering: We drank unpasteurized milk/went shoeless/found our own amusements, for years. We drove with not the slightest thought of carseats or seatbelts. This new stuff! and with it, the impression's given that 'new stuff' is unnecessary, extraneous, foolish, even wasteful.

I don't have an answer to that (usually) unvoiced opinion, either. I think I used to have one, but as I find I tend to do over time (must be that maturity thing), I came to a realization that soapbox-standing is not my metier. There is a certain aspect to EBL that is evangelical, so that a proportion of research articles and editorials about EBL are about persuasion ('for years editors of leading LIS journals have deplored the quality of practitioner research...') Shouldn't our discourse be about those questions, about our existing practices, about our perceived needs? Otherwise it's selling - not ice in Alaska - but ice someplace where there is no use for it.

Why bother?

2008-10-13T06:50:00.006-04:00

Why should we bother providing evidence, examining the basis for our ideas - when decisions in the workplace (as elsewhere) are usually made from the gut?

Is evidence-based librarianship, as an initiative, a Sisyphean, pointless labor intended only to amplify the egos of those who champion it (and belittle the voices of the experts against which, it might be claimed, it is arrayed)?

Yesterday my blood pressure was raised, and raised again. No problem - one must get exercise.

Recently, I read the JESSE listserv, and found (yet another) diatribe by an LIS educator against Second Life (SL). Let it be said that I am biased here, because I have been employed there, paid by a grant (the most recent of four) from the National Library of Medicine. The ongoing debate has been between those who claim SL is an important area for exploration, and those who argue it's a waste of time.

This person, who is presumably educating students, displayed a breathtaking arrogance in attacking librarians' activities in SL. First, the valid argument is made that data is lacking. This is fine and warranted (though I must say it would be difficult to provide much demographic data when you cannot even collect IP addresses) but unfortunately, the attack continues.

If this person had left it there, it would have retained a precarious stance as critical inquiry, but unfortunately, this is not what happened. Instead, they continued, writing about how they, in their professional and personal life, are doing real things of 'real' value, and find no need to engage in playacting. The implication is very clearly that those who are active in virtual worlds are not doing such things. Their attack ends by saying they doubt these things could be better done in a virtual world.

The argument described above is not made within the framework of formal rhetoric. It is not presented as the end result of academic inquiry. Instead, it is presented from the stance of expert, essentially an informally published editorial comment shared with peers in JESSE, a forum for educators in information science:

jESSE is a listserv discussion group that, since 1994, promotes discussion of library and information science education issues in a world-wide context. It addresses issues of curricula, administration, research, and education theory and practice as they relate to information science issues in general, and in general academia as the membership feels so moved. It is one of the primary outlets for faculty position announcements in LIS. Specific queries on lost resources and other minutia are welcome, as are broader questions for general discussion (from the listserv description, found here).

It is presented and then signed using the author's full signature block, and is available to any person who cares to view it, including students, press, and others, who take the time to search the archives. At the very least, then, it's the public statement of someone acting in their public, professional persona, issuing an expert opinion about the topic in a forum designated for professional discussion.

I find myself as a doctoral student feeling some pressure to be circumspect in writing about this. It is not my intention to position myself as expert, or to even attempt to stifle free expression. I am frustrated and a little appalled at the level of this discourse.

I draw parallels, perhaps unfair ones, to the level of discourse surrounding the presidential candidates. That was my second blood pressure-riser yesterday. Opinion in this public debate is accorded the status of fact (whatever that is!) - and thus the argument becomes one of innuendo against half-baked assertion. There is no countering such personalized claims, in the case of the current political atmosphere, so that the entire discussion becomes empty sputtering, name calling, baseless animus, replicated caricature.

I am fairly certain this is not the way to move ahead. We can debate about what will benefit our profession, and argue over direction, but placed upon a table for examination, such practices find no credence in the profession.

Questions about questions about questions

2008-09-22T06:57:00.003-04:00

If the research we conduct is built on research that is less than solid, are we asking the right questions? For works cited as foundational to our own discovery process, we are intended to realize and utilize salvageable elements, if no better works exist. This is done because of the realizations that a) no perfect work exists; b) the post-positivist realization that truth is relative and conditional; and c) LIS research is incomplete, lacking in coverage and rigor.

It means something rather tiresome, which is that works cited in a piece of research must themselves need to be critically evaluated - a fundamental part of the EBLIP model. But it could really make you tear hair out to then realize: what about the works they cite, and so on? Perhaps it's like retrospective cataloging of a collection, where the decision may be to go forth and sin no more - and in the case of research, to go forth having thoroughly evaluated the sins of past excursions, salvaging bits of wisdom. I have this vision of broken amphorae, patched in with contrasting colors so that we can see what the original was, with full realization of missing parts.

Here our amphorae are surveys done on Medlib-L, or Publib-L, responded to by a self-selected audience and decidedly not bias-free. Or reports of 'how I done it at my library,' program descriptions about a new class, with the self-satisfied conclusion that attendees were pleased. They might be blog postings, conference abstracts or poster session - un-indexed, with little or no consideration of previous research. But they remain, artifacts of experience and reflection.

I have talked with others about their use of resources such as the CSA LISA database in supporting decisions (and please note, here is a nonsupported, observationally-based conclusion): Many have said that they can never find things in LISA, or that what they find is insufficient. Tens of journal editors have bemoaned the lack of rigor and quantity in our research (this is far from unsupported - if you want cites, just ask). In this posting about questioning questions, I end with one: can we afford to walk away from our amphorae?

Teaching EBLIP

2008-09-14T11:55:00.003-04:00

This semester (fall 2008), I'm teaching a class with Joanne Marshall on evidence-based library & information practice (hereinafter referred to as the rather ungainly EBLIP). It's our second collaborative effort, and what an adventure! First, though I've taught small groups and one-on-one for years, it's always been as a coaching or one-time session, rather than a full semester experience. I feel a bit as if I'd jumped in the deep end, pedagogically, but then this is precisely the sort of thing I'd like to be teaching. I have loved the seminar-style courses that really engage people in learning and teaching, so that we're exploring topics in a systematic and open way - this is definitely a great way to learn, but it's a challenge to teach. I'm very glad to be working with Joanne on this.

We'd based the first full semester course we'd taught around the Booth and Brice book(1) as our official text, and a modular tutorial I created(2), bringing in speakers from the UNC campus (social work, nursing, public health) to discuss the adaptation of EBP to their profession, and also had the serendipitous occasion to participate during class time with the Canadian Library Association workshop led by Su Cleyle, on EBLIP(3).

The experience was a very good one, and in fact we wrote a chapter on how we conceived and conducted the course for Elizabeth Connor's edited work, Evidence-based librarianship: Case studies and active learning exercises(4). But this summer, thinking hard about what I felt might be the really seminal aspects of the course, I had several realizations. It didn't hurt that I've simultaneously been reading deeply in the literature of EBM, EBL, and all the many publications exploring librarians' publication patterns.

One was that the tutorial places undue emphasis on EBM and its development, and really less on the examination of issues related to the adoption/adaptation of EBP to library settings. I think it may be important to understand the roots of EBP development, but it seems at least as important to place it (EBM, I mean) in context of contributing factors, and to provide contrast with EBP in other fields of study (such as social work, education, nursing, etc.) so that we do not get bogged down in healthcare contexts.

There is so much to say about EBM - practice setting decision making, (questions, diagnosis, etc.); regulatory factors; culture; education, etc.) that one day I'd really like to write the book: Comparative Evidence-based Practice. I had begun something on this at the tail end of the first EBLIP course, because I was so inspired by what I'd learned about the adaptation of EBP by other disciplines. There is much, much more to say on this, and I think it will be instructive for our own profession to think about what's been done in order to see what might be done. In fact, one of the papers to be written this semester (and in the last class) will be one where students take another area of practice and summarize how EBP has been adopted & adapted, considering contextual isssues and finally, whether LIS could benefit from specific tools or practices around that adaptation process.

Second, while we did practice critical evaluation of LIS research, I felt it wasn't, somehow, enough. I wanted the class to be a transformative experience, and envisioned a journal club, with rotating responsibilities for facilitation, where we read and critically evaluate LIS research. Part of the discussion is around the use of critical evaluation tools: Do they work? What sort of evaluative tools do we need to build? We read and had a first try at critical evaluation last week using a bibliometric study(5), finding the process involving, and bringing up a lot of questions about the tools and much more. We'll be doing this throughout the entire semester, and instructors are not exempt :).

Perhaps as a direct consequence of my dissertation work, I have also found my initial understanding of EBLIP to be shallow, with assumptions unexamined (such as the more-or-less automatic acceptance of the evidence pyramid). I find myself not so likely to say to students: Well, here's the topic. Let's practice the skills now. It's not about that - it cannot be, not if we are intending to truly engage in discourse. It's a matter of walking the walk, eh? I am less sure of how to direct this process (tending to want to meander off, seeing all sorts of digressive issues) and am grateful for the presence of a syllabus and the time-boundaries of a weekly class, which we're teaching via Blackboard and teleconferencing.

(1) Booth A & Brice A. (2004). Evidence-based practice for information professionals: a handbook. London, England: Facet Publications.
(2) EBL Course Syllabus, used the first time we taught the course.
(3) Cleyle S. (2005, Sept. 21). Evidence based library and information practice - the Canadian scene. CLA Teleconference Series.
(4) Perryman C & Marshall JG. Designing a curriculum in evidence-based practice for Master’s students in library and information science. In E. Connor (Ed.), Evidence-based librarianship: Case studies and active learning exercises, Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2007.
(5) Antonisse MJ, Burright MA,& Hahn, TB. (2005). Understanding information use in a multidisciplinary field: A local citation analysis of neuroscience research. College & Research Libraries, 66(3):198-210.

First thoughts

2008-09-13T14:15:00.002-04:00

There are so few resources out there for librarians interested in EBL/EBLIP (whatever you'd like to call it)! I don't know if I'll keep this up but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Here's my primary goal, other than finishing my dissertation and returning to gainful employment: enabling an active discourse among multi-type librarians about the profession itself, especially about how we make decisions.

I keep quoting Pat Thibodeau, Duke University Medical Center's Library director, who made a half-joking comment that 'librarians are anarchists.' It is her sense that we focus so much on serving our communities, defining collections, policies, and activities by those whom we serve, that the mere thought of identifying best practices in many areas is anathema. I don't mean to jest about this any more than she did, though. In a profession defined by service, it is most appropriate to shape practice in response to need.

One question that occurs about this, however, is just how we do that (I know, I know - Libqual). That's a terrific advance. But what if, at your library, you recognize a need that is not adequately measured by such tools, or if you are unprepared to go beyond user satisfaction measurements - and then find you need to do so, or risk budgets?

There's another question, too. This one is rather self-evident as well. What do we say we teach patrons in any kind of library where teaching is involved (I mean, the overarching goal of it)? Isn't it information literacy... critical thinking? - (and I see you nodding). Where is our own form of literacy, does that stop at competency?