#blogjune Day 12: In this video I share another top tip for becoming (more) evidence-based in library and information professional practice – share your work and learning!
My day: I’m one tired Mumma tonight. Mr N had a morning of playtime – a neighbourhood walk before the hubby started work, drawing with pencils, general mucking around with his toys (stacking, shape sorting, dancing and shaking his maracas), ‘being Daddy’ with a computer keyboard, and food prep. Lunch was spaghetti with sauce and cheese on top. Mr N had a ball! (cue big clean up). But Mr N didn’t nap very long! An hour goes so quickly. Then, we had a family photo shoot session to celebrate Mr N turning one (nearly three months ago). An early one for me, I think.
Transcript
G’day and welcome to this video series of chatting about all things evidence-based library & information practice. In this video I am talking about becoming evidence based.
In addition to starting where you are by noticing what evidence informs practice and services, sharing your learning is another great way of becoming more evidence-based. Though I recognise that it’s not always an easy thing to do.
But professional knowledge is one of the three sources recognised in the current EBLIP model and so to make the most of this we need to engage in critical thinking and reflection in order to draw out this professional knowledge and experience that we possess and share it with others whether this be formally or informally.
Reflection requires us to take a pause and in this day and age where we keep going and going going this is really hard to do and think about what we’ve learned or have come to know about something in our practice.
The other thing I’ll recognise here is organisational or team culture is not always supportive of sharing learning and so this can have an impact or influence on if, when and where you share your learning, either internally within your workplace and even externally.
And the third thing is that sharing sometimes means that we have to be vulnerable and battle those anxieties like, will I look stupid if I say something about this? But making the most engaging with our professional knowledge is too good of an opportunity to ignore.
Become evidence-based by sharing
So you can start by keeping that journal and then when you feel ready, start reaching out to colleagues or even to your external network. This could be on Twitter, at conferences or other events or even just the coffee catch-up. Not all learning has to be be made available through conference presentations or publication. It can be quite informal. Blogging is also another way, another platform on which to process and share learning.
Sharing our work and learning is important not only for our profession in library and information science but also the very communities that we serve.
If you are new to evidence-based practice or you’re looking to become more evidence-based my top tips from the last couple of videos have been,
- Start where you are and notice what evidence informs practice and services
- Prioritise critical reflection and thinking and,
- Share your learning with others.
Until next time, take care. Cheers.
References
Koufogiannakis, D. (2011). Considering the place of practice-based evidence within Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP). Library & Information Research, 35(111), 41-58.
Questions?
If you have any questions at all about EBLIP, do get in touch. I’ll try to address them in this video series (or a future blog post).
You can also view Day 12 (Becoming Evidence-Based Part 2) video here.
Catch up on all the videos here.
