#blogjune Day 29: The last couple of videos are slightly longer, going over the 3 1/2 minute mark. But, bear with me. 🙂 In this video, I provide a short, and slightly longer answer to the question, who’s responsibility is EBP? Also, I identify key roles and elements to help enable engagement with EBP at every level and across the profession.
Transcript
G’day and welcome to this video series chatting about evidence-based library and information practice. I’m Alisa Howlett, the Coordinator of Evidence-Based Practice at the University of Southern Queensland Library.
Everyone is responsible for being evidence-based
Today I’d like to talk about who’s responsibility is evidence-based practice? The short answer is that its everyone’s responsibility, but hear me out. First two things, we need to shift from this thinking about doing evidence-based practice and that it’s reserved for those big undertakings or it’s reserved for those specific roles within an organisation. The other thing is that we need to break this myth or barrier that “well i’m not a researcher therefore evidence-based practice isn’t for me or it’s not my job”. Serving clients and communities in the best ways possible is our job, is our responsibility. And so evidence-based practice or being evidence-based is a way to achieve this.
Years ago Hallam and Partridge made some suggestions for responsibility at every level of the profession – so at the professional associations, educators, organisations or libraries or employers, library leaders and individual professionals. Also in the maturity model findings we’ve got a few pillars there. The key here being engagement.
At every level, in every role – Engaging in EBP is key
Engaging in evidence-based practice at every level of the profession. Also the sub themes in engagement, the shared responsibility, the priority, the skills and capability, shared understanding and leadership, sharing at every level. Those things I think could be worked into those suggestions as well and build upon them to make evidence-based practice more of a ‘being’ rather than a ‘doing’ by a certain number of people.
Also there’s that finding around engagement in the promotion, how its prioritised and how evidence-based practice is enabled. I think those could be worked in to responsibility as well.
Suggestions for better enabling EBP in LIS
A couple of suggestions then – evidence-based practice needs to be made part of every job description. Also I think there needs to be a research methods course provided by professional associations. I did an evidence-based practice course back in 2010 by the University of Sheffield, I believe. That needs to happen. That needs to be provided or accessible to library and information professionals to upskill themselves in this area.
The last suggestion I’ll make here is we need to be open to doing things differently and that might mean that evidence might be surprising sometimes. So you know, we need to be open to what the evidence is providing us and what it is our clients and communities need from our services. We need to be open to doing that. We need to be open to doing things differently to align better with our clients and communities and evidence-based practice is a way to achieve this.
Until next time, take care. Cheers.
References
Hallam & Partridge. (2006). Evidence based library and information practice: Whose responsibility is it anyway? Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 1(3), pp. 88-94.
You can also view Day 29 (Who’s responsibility is EBP?) video here.
Catch up on all the videos here.
