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3 - Evidence-based information practice: a prehistory

from Part 1 - The context for evidence-based information practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2018

Jonathan Eldredge
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine and Coordinator of Academic and Clinical Services in the Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center at the University of New Mexico
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Summary

Introduction

Although the contribution of evidence to information practice has only been recognized in recent years, librarianship has a long pedigree in practitioner-based research. The first known cohort study in health librarianship was reported in 1946 and other health librarians adapted the basic cohort design to answer important questions during the 1950s and early 1960s. The first randomized controlled trial (RCT) in health librarianship took place during the late 1970s. A small but identifiable stream of such studies continued during the early 1990s (see Box 3.1).

Thus, health librarians can point to use of research designs such as cohort studies or RCTs even before ‘evidence-based medicine’ was first reported.

This chapter charts the development of practitioner-led research as a fundamental platform for evidence-based librarianship (EBL) and the broader, evidence-based information practice (EBIP). It considers where EBIP has come from, examines major historical developments, and highlights a few individual contributions in our search for the early origins of EBIP.

In the beginning …

… was a question. Evidence-based information practice (EBIP) existed as a concept long before it became a label. A long time ago someone working in a library asked, ‘Is this really the best way to do this?’ Or, perhaps they wondered, ‘Why don't we try doing this a new way instead of the way we have always done it?’ Or, perhaps they asked, ‘Why don't more people use our library?’ What happened next probably depended upon how their manager (or some other person in authority) reacted to their questioning of conventional wisdom. The identity of that first librarian is lost to the obscurity of time.

Early EBIP antecedents

The roots of EBIP pre-date the modern international movement and may be traced in the histories of the profession and biographies of noted librarians, professional ‘ancestors’ who exhibited, at times, one or more of its defining characteristics. Surveying the past 5500 years, however, historian James Thompson (Thompson, 1977) makes the humbling observation that: ‘The development of libraries and librarianship has not been some kind of evolutionary process whereby these have grown better and better’.

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Publisher: Facet
Print publication year: 2004

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