Conference Report

Catriona Denoon

Evidence-Based Librarianship : Pooling our Knowledge
Wednesday 24 September 2003
King’s Fund, London

This course took place on a sunny day at the King’s Fund Centre in London. On checking the list of names in the conference pack I saw that out of the 71 delegates present, most of whom worked in health libraries, I seemed to be the only person who was based in Scotland. I was lucky that on this occasion my employers had agreed to pay my expenses, since many staff in Scotland seem to miss the opportunity to attend courses held south of the border.

The two stated aims of the day were:

• To provide an update on current thinking in evidence-based librarianship; and
• To showcase the UK contribution to the second Evidence-Based Librarianship Conference in Edmonton Alberta in June 2003. Presentations were made by each of the UK speakers who attended that conference. Details of these and other presentations from Edmonton are hosted on the conference website at www.eblib.net . The London conference presentations are to be hosted on it soon. The site also contains the presentations from the first EBL conference held in Sheffield in 2001.

In the first talk of the day Andrew Booth quoted from the Research policy statement of the Medical Library Association : “The key to evidence based information practice is the ongoing development and application of health information science research.” … “Individual health sciences librarians must apply the results of research routinely to library and information service practice, to the development of information policy, and to other information issues important to health care institutions”. He then pointed out that out of 362,540 trials in the current edition of the Cochrane Library, only 8 trials are on librarianship or information science. He emphasised the importance for the future of the information professions that a solid evidence base be produced by the profession to guide future developments.

He then acknowledged that most librarians do not have the opportunity during their working day to acquire, develop and practice their skills, but have to make time during lunchtimes, after work or during weekends. He spoke about his role in running CPD programmes for librarians, culminating in the pilot FOLIO distance learning programme which was run for the National Electronic Library for Health (NeLH) in the early part of 2003. There were 3 courses - “Project management”, “Evaluating your service” and “Evidence-based librarianship”. Over 500 librarians participated worldwide, including several from libraries in Scotland. Following the success of this programme, plans are being made for more - though they are likely to last for 6-8 weeks rather than the rather frantic 3 week-long courses held this year.

Lunch followed, in the splendid Kings Fund dining room. The doctors and researchers found their peace disrupted by over 70 librarians, made skittish by the prospect of a free lunch.

The first talk of the afternoon was a very interesting presentation from Carol Lefebvre, Information Specialist at the Cochrane Library. She told us that the UK Cochrane Centre is currently hand-searching the information science literature and incorporating reports to relevant studies in the Cochrane Methodology Register (part of the Cochrane Library). This is being done with a view to improving access to methodological research in the field of information science.

She gave examples of evidence-based information science within the Collaboration, and these included an analysis of the overlap between different bibliographic databases; and a comparison between the methods of retrieving qualitative research evidence from electronic bibliographic databases, from fulltext electronic journals, and cover-to-cover hand searching of print journals. One result which stood out for me was a comparison in one study between handsearching and database searching for RCTs - out of 34 eligible studies which had previously been identified, 92-100% were retrieved by handsearching, while only 42-80% were retrieved by bibliographic database searching.

Carol said that a new Cochrane Group was being considered - the Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group - which would focus on the methodology of information retrieval. She drew attention to the work being done by the Cochrane Methods Groups and the Cochrane Database of Methodology Reviews (part of the Cochrane Library). She also spoke about the Campbell Collaboration, sister organisation to Cochrane, which concentrates on social, educational and educational subjects. It can be found at www.campbellcollaboration.org .

Carol Blackhall presented preliminary results of a survey to measure use and knowledge of the Cochrane Library among staff in a clinical department of St George’s NHS Trust in London. The questionnaire measured awareness of the service, levels of use, and perceptions of its user friendliness. Preliminary results indicated that staff do not use the Cochrane Library regularly, and that overall use of the service is low. However those who have used it have said that the reviews they found were of high quality. One memorable statistic quoted was that 50% of staff questioned in this department said they had never heard of the Cochrane Library.

Alison Brettle presented details of her recent systematic review on the effectiveness of information skills training (which can also be found in the EBL supplement to the June 2003 issue of Health Information and Libraries Journal). She said that while users value training in information skills, there is very little evidence available to evaluate the quality of training. Her study aims to investigate measures to evaluate the effectiveness of training with a view to developing and validating a measure which is simple and easy for information professionals to use. This is a very interesting area of work which, as the speaker confirmed, has many complex issues arising from it.

I found the concluding talk both inspiring and frustrating. Andrew Booth and Anne Brice spoke about how we as a profession should take forward evidence based practice, and begin to build an evidence base for information work. They highlighted the support available from CILIP and HLG (no mention was made of developments in Scotland), and the future plans for the FOLIO courses. However the difficulty of getting funding for projects was clearly a major issue - even the FOLIO courses had been run on a shoestring.

The hints provided for us on how we should make time for research - doing literature searches during our lunch breaks, slipping our own ILL requests unnoticed into the pile of doctors’ requests in our libraries, and subscribing to professional journals out of our own pockets - were a true reflection of the constraints of time and budget under which most of us operate. However after a day which had provided such a positive vision for librarianship as a dynamic and research-based profession, it seemed a shame to end with a reminder that librarians have a very low profile, and that funding opportunities are very rare.

However this was a rare downbeat note in a day which had provided much inspiration and food for thought. A list of references arising from the day is below:

Further reading

1. Evidence-based health information practice : a supplement of Health Information and Libraries Journal 20(1) June 2003
2. Booth, A and Brice, A ed. (2003) Evidence-based practice for information professionals: a handbook Facet £39.95 1856044718
3. Cochrane Library, available via the “Databases” link on the NHS Scotland eLibrary,
4. Campbell Collaboration,
5. Evidence Based Librarianship website,
6. EBL discussion group, evidence-based-libraries@jiscmail.ac.uk

Catriona Denoon
Library Service Manager
Maria Henderson Library
Trust Headquarters
Gartnavel Royal Hospital
0141 211 3913
catriona.denoon@gartnavel.glacomen.scot.nhs.uk