Commentary

 

Moving the EBLIP Community’s Research Agenda Forward

 

Jonathan D. Eldredge

Associate Professor

Biomedical Informatics Research, Training and Scholarship

Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center/Family and Community Medicine

Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States of America

Email: jeldredge@unm.edu

   

Heather N. Holmes

Clinical Informationist

Summa Health System

Akron City & St. Thomas Hospitals

Instructor, Department of Internal Medicine

Northeastern Ohio Medical University

Akron, Ohio, United States of America

Email: holmesh@summahealth.org

 

Marie T. Ascher

Lillian Hetrick Huber Endowed Library Director

Health Sciences Library

New York Medical College

Valhalla, New York, United States of America

Email: marie_ascher@nymc.edu

 

Received: 20 Mar. 2015  Accepted: 14 May 2015

 

 

cc-ca_logo_xl 2015 Eldredge, Holmes, and Ascher. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the same or similar license to this one.

 

Four times a year a new issue of EBLIP appears on the scene. Each issue brims with evidence summaries, original research reports, and commentaries. The eight editors, nine copyeditors, nearly 100 regular peer reviewers, and numerous authors contribute voluntarily to the production of this peer reviewed, open access journal. In any given year there are thousands of downloads from the EBLIP site, attesting to the wide use of EBLIP.

 

Participation in the production and use of EBLIP spans six continents and includes every type of library or information practitioner. Many of those either publishing in EBLIP or benefitting from its contents have never met one another. Only a fraction of those colleagues loosely affiliated with EBLIP have participated in the international biannual EBLIP conferences. These small conferences, with only a couple of hundred attendees, provide face-to-face contacts that build a common sense of purpose, although those contacts might translate into some ongoing or future associations with our EBLIP journal.

 

Our profession’s version of evidence based practice (EBP) as an interest area and decision-making method might be thought of as a movement (Glynn, 2007; Koufogiannakis, 2012; Lewis, 2011). A movement is an important concept for understanding the place of EBP in fostering professional accountability, which seems to be an underlying theme in the great interest expressed in EBP by diverse professions (Eldredge, 2014). Yet, a movement is an abstract concept. The conferences are more tangible, but these occur at only two-year intervals and are attended by only a minority of interested practitioners.

 

That leaves the EBLIP journal as the most tangible forum for colleagues with an interest in EBP for our profession. On the surface, EBLIP might be a journal; it also represents a mostly virtual community that shares the goal of making EBP a firmly established reality. The authors define our profession’s version of EBP, namely evidence based library and information practice, in the following way:

 

A sequential, structured process for integrating the best available evidence into making important decisions. The practitioner applies this decision making process by using the best available evidence while informed by a pragmatic perspective developed from working in the field, critical thinking skills, an awareness of different research designs, and modulated by knowledge of the affected user population’s values or preferences. (Eldredge, 2012, p. 139)

 

Producers and consumers affiliated with the journal might constitute what Wenger (1998) describes as a “community of practice.” When one reads Wenger closely, it quickly becomes apparent that those colleagues associated with our EBLIP journal resemble a community of practice. Wenger notes that a community of practice fosters dynamic learning through professional practice. EBLIP certainly advances that goal.

 

Over the last decade our journal as well as our conference planners clearly have resisted institutionalization. Wenger recognizes that “institutionalization consumes energy. It requires continual maintenance” (p. 243). To the extent that any institutionalization does exists, Wenger reports that it should exist solely to serve the community of practice. Provided that we might even define our journal as an “institution” in Wenger’s sense of the term, EBLIP certainly subsumes itself to the goal of applying research evidence in practice.

 

How should we define our future direction as a community of practice? Perhaps a research agenda might inform where we devote much of our energy as a community? Fortunately, some members of our community of practice have experience with defining a research agenda. A team of librarians in Sweden conducted a Delphi study to define the research agenda for their colleagues in that country (Maceviciute & Wilson, 2009). Unaware of our Swedish colleagues’ efforts, the same year members of our team in the United States conducted a different type of Delphi study to define a research agenda for the Medical Library Association (Eldredge, Harris, & Ascher, 2009). A Delphi study allows members of a group who hold diverse views to reach a satisfactory group consensus. In the U.S. study we focused upon generating important and answerable research questions. Our experiences matched the observations of others regarding the question formulation process (Booth, 2006; Kloda, 2008; Sutton, A., Booth, A. & Evans, P., 2013). We believed earnestly that once we had defined the research agenda, applied researchers would implement an action plan to answer its practical research questions. Instead, we were bewildered by the apparent inaction among researchers to answer these top-ranked research questions.

 

After conducting a second Delphi study (Eldredge, Ascher, Holmes, & Harris, 2012), we tried to find a way to implement the new research agenda. We developed the idea of linking each of the 15 top-ranked research questions to a systematic review. This new dimension would help build the growing body of systematic reviews in library and information science (Koufogiannakis, 2012). We were happily surprised when over 200 colleagues, a third of them from outside the United States and some even outside health sciences libraries, volunteered for our 15 systematic review teams. We reported on this project at EBLIP7 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (Eldredge, Ascher, & Holmes, 2013), and we will be reporting on the project during EBLIP8 in Brisbane this July. We will be happy to answer your specific questions in Brisbane or via email.

 

First, however, our community of practice needs to determine if it wants to define a research agenda. Second, it needs to define the scope of the project. Will such a project include all registered users of EBLIP supplemented with the attendees at recent EBLIP conferences? Third, it has to define the methodology. We employed the Delphi method because it allowed for electronically assisted asynchronous consensus formation. While we think that this methodology to be best suited to such a research inquiry, we all need to be open to other methodologies (Brettle, 2012). Once a research agenda takes shape, will systematic reviews be the next best step?

 

We the authors have experience with all three aspects of such a project and are willing to serve as resource persons for any project team with an interest. Finally, we are happy to serve more tangentially as an information-sharing clearinghouse to help potentially interested colleagues to organize a possible project.

 

References

 

Booth, A. (2006). Clear and present questions: Formulating questions for evidence based practice. Library Hi Tech, 24(3), 355-368. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/07378830610692127

 

Brettle, A. (2012). Learning from others about research evidence. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 7(2), 1-3. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP

 

Eldredge, J. D. (2012). The evolution of evidence based library and information practice, Part I: Defining EBLIP. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 7(4), 139-145. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP

 

Eldredge, J. D. (2014). The evolution of evidence based library and information practice, Part III: Revitalizing the Profession through EBLIP. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 9(1), 62-73. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP

 

Eldredge, J. D., Harris, M. R., & Ascher, M.T. (2009). Defining the Medical Library Association research agenda: Methodology and final results from a consensus process. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 97(3), 178-185. http://dx.doi.org/10.3163/1536-5050.97.3.006

 

Eldredge, J. D., Ascher M. T., Holmes, H. N., & Harris, M. R. (2012). The new Medical Library Association research agenda: final results from a three-phase Delphi study. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 100(3), 214-218. http://dx.doi.org/10.3163/1536-5050.100.3.012

 

Eldredge, J. D., Ascher M. T., & Holmes, H. N. (2013, July 17). Implementing a national EBLIP research agenda. Poster presented at the 7th International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference (EBLIP7), Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.    

 

Glynn, L. (2007). Defending evidence based practice. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 2(2), 1-2. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP

 

Kloda, L. (2008). Asking the right question. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 3(4), 79-81. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP

 

Koufogiannakis, D. (2012). The state of systematic reviews in library and information studies. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 7(2), 91-95. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP

 

Lewis, S. (2011). Evidence based library and information practice in Australia: Defining skills and knowledge. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 28 (2), 152-155. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-1842.2011.00937.x

 

Maceviciute, E. & Wilson, T. D. (2009). A Delphi investigation into the research needs in Swedish librarianship. Information Research, 14 (4), paper 419. http://www.informationr.net/ir/index.html

 

Sutton, A., Booth, A. & Evans, P. (2013). “Ask, acquire, appraise”: A study of LIS practitioners participating in an EBLIP continuing education course. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 8(2), 200-213. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP

 

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.