Keynote abstracts

Bridging the Gaps: Linking Our EBLIP Questions to Our Decisions

Jonathan Eldredge, PhD

The EBLIP process consists of: formulating important and answerable questions; searching for evidence relevant to answering these questions; critically appraising evidence; making decisions; and, evaluating these decisions retrospectively. Although this process resembles other forms of evidence based practice, EBLIP questions and forms of evidence sometimes differ significantly from professions such as medicine or public health.

EBLIP serves the primary purpose of making sound professional decisions. While EBLIP practitioners need to attend to iterative possibilities while pursuing their processes, as time-sensitized practitioners we normally do not have the luxury of academic researchers who can pursue more time-consuming, multiply iterative processes in which questions might undergo a series of revisions.

This interactive session will focus on the special kinds of questions that initiate the EBLIP process, with attention paid to clarifying EBLIP questions to avoid repeating the EBLIP process while en route to making sound decisions. Current information technology has led to the emerging trend of “mutual mentoring” to leverage our limited resources when practicing EBLIP. Can this information technology also assist in establishing the foundation for an international EBLIP research agenda by networking EBLIP questions emerging from different national consensus fora?

There are many types of questions that we might experience in our professional, educational, or personal lives. Questions in the EBLIP process represent a specialized and select subset of all questions we experience. The question formulation stage in the EBLIP process can lend insight, however, into how we might anticipate the future direction of our EBLIP movement.

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Bridging the gap between users and systems – the potential contribution of Social Informatics to Evidence Based Library and Information Practice  

Dr. Anita Mirijamdotter

Evidence based library and information practice (EBLIP) is concerned with asking the right questions and obtaining relevant evidence. According to the linear process of EBLIP, the evidence is then reviewed and, if judged promising, applied. Finally, the impact of application is assessed and evaluated in relation to the problem that prompted the question and started the whole process.  

Social informatics, on the other hand, is focused on studying the use of information and communication technology (ICT), something that the EBLIP process heavily relies on. However, the purpose of studying ICT use is design oriented, i.e., to improve the design of systems and products. In this context, methodological aspects of finding out, modelling, assessing and evaluating becomes a main concern for the design, as well as conceptualising ICT systems as part of organisational processes.  

To bridge the gap between users and systems, the design methodology needs to be interactive and participative in nature. Further, it needs to include techniques for explicating different stakeholder perspectives, which, when explored, may raise critical and ethical issues. Such a methodology has been combined with the EBLIP process of posing questions, gathering evidence, assessing alternatives, valuing, and deciding on actions to later be evaluated.  

The interactive and participatory EBLIP approach has been applied in three university library organisations, in Scandinavia and in the U.S. The main idea was to gather as rich evidence as possible to enable new ways of understanding and by that open up new possibilities for improving the situation. Evidence is here interpreted in broader terms than in its medical model counterpart. This keynote will report on the latest application.  

The conclusion so far, a fruitful way forward for professional development is posing open questions, learning from various perspectives, evaluating frame of references, and use systems thinking.

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Bridging the Gap between Service Provision and Customer Expectations
Professor Sue McKnight

Expectations for service provision constantly change as the environment, personal experiences of customers, and technology and other service delivery options evolve. This poses an ongoing management challenge to understand customer expectations, to see what is happening on the horizon that will impact on customer service and the capacity of the service to respond to the changes, and better still, to proactively engage in service improvements, understanding what the customer expects.

This presentation will draw upon research undertaken in Australia and the United Kingdom to identify customer values, and irritants to service delivery, and the process used to engage staff in identifying actions that bridge the gap between current performance and customer expectations.

The literature on customer values is most common in the commercial sector but much less so in libraries and in other not-for-profit service organisations. However, drawing on the methodologies of business, and instilling a true customer-focussed culture amongst library staff, is important for achieving service excellence.

By embedding a management framework that requires customer consultation, staff engagement, and constant feedback, evidence is gathered that enables informed decision-making and provides the basis for a two-way communication between customers and stakeholders and the service provider. And success breeds success!

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”Bridging the skills gap – Shaping the information professional of the future”.

Birgitta Olander

The last two decades have seen rapid and extensive changes in society and an explosive development in information and communication technologies. This has created a new and different arena for library and information services placing new demands on the skills of their professionals. There are no indications that the rate of change will slow down in the medium-term future, in spite of the global recession. Planning for the university education of LIS professionals one has to take into account not only the general aspects of progressive change in working life structures but also the impact on the library and information sector of technological development and organisational transformation. This kind of planning is based on environmental scanning and involves a large portion of forecasting, educated guesses and reasonably well-argued predictions about the skills required by library and information professionals of the future. This keynote will identify and discuss some of the criteria that may be used as tools for such forecasting. The LIS students of today can anticipate a professional life of 30-35 years after having completed their degrees. This means that the skills they now acquire at university should be relevant also in 2040 – which is an absurd scenario. It is obvious that life-long professional education is required in addition to the university degree. This is not the same as on-the-job training but rather a professionalism founded in the LIS university education and further developed during the course of one’s career. In order to accomplish evidence based library and information practice each professional must know their subject area as well as the context of the services they provide. It is vital that in addition to their command of library and information science theory - pure and applied - the LIS professionals have learnt how to learn. My keynote will also address the pedagogical challenges facing LIS educators today.

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Conditions for research use in library and information practice – a matter of learning   

Ola Pilerot

This keynote concerns the relations between research activities in library and information science (LIS) – including the outcomes of these activities – and professional library and information activities. The aim of the presentation is to increase the understanding of how knowledge grounded in, and influenced by, LIS research can develop and become relevant and useful within professional practice. To conclude this main theme it is necessary to describe the relation between research production and -utilisation. The starting point is that the matter of learning constitutes a central part in this relation. How people learn, and negotiate what is important in their specific practice, is a question that can be answered in various ways. Arguments in favour of a socio-cultural and discursive perspective on learning are put forward; a perspective that emphasise the role played by culture and language in human development, and the mutual dependency between social and individual (or organisational) knowledge formation. In particular, the keynote focuses on how these relations can be described within a specific area of LIS, namely between research on information seeking and the teaching of information seeking in order to support information literacy. Examples are taken from the area of teaching information seeking as this is described in the literature, and from the authors’ own experience of teaching information seeking. The presentation concludes with a suggestion for how research on information seeking possibly can be used by practitioners that teach for information literacy.

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