Category Archives: Adjunct Member

Sometimes you just need a librarian. And sometimes, you just need a statistician.

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by Christine Neilson
Information Specialist, St. Michael’s Hospital
Toronto, Ontario

Statistics has been on my mind for a variety of reasons lately. As a practitioner/researcher (emphasis on the practitioner part!) I dabble in library research when I can find the time, but I often feel inadequate when it comes to stats. Based on anecdotal evidence, I believe that I’m not alone. I’ve taken introductory stats classes and I know what a p value is, but I feel ill prepared to conduct statistical analysis beyond basic descriptive stats; averages, percentage, and that kind of thing.

The issue of different types of evidence aside, conducting meaningful statistical analysis – correctly – is a matter that has troubled me for a long time. There are a variety of statistical programs available but these tools can’t substitute for actually knowing what you’re doing, and thinking that they will can only lead to trouble. It’s similar to using bibliographic databases without knowing how searching works; thinking that a person should be able to sit down and immediately do an effective, efficient search when they don’t know what the process is, what the commands mean, and when it is appropriate to use which one. But the idea of contracting statistical analysis for a research project to someone else with serious statistical chops somehow seems like cheating. If I’m going to be a real researcher, my internal voice tells me, I should be able to do it myself. I want to be able to do it myself.

Unlike many of the contributors to the Brain-Work blog, I work in a hospital library rather than in academia, and one of my major roles is doing literature searches for health professionals who are conducting research. My colleagues and I provide consults for the do-it-yourselfers, but we encourage our clients to take advantage of our literature search services because we can search better and faster; this isn’t a slight against anyone, it’s simply a fact that we have different areas of expertise. As one of my colleagues likes to say, “Sometimes you just need a librarian”.

So what’s my problem then? We are asking our clients to let go a little bit and trust someone with a specialized skill set, shouldn’t I be able to do the same? If sometimes you just need a librarian, then sometimes you just need a statistician. I’ve been involved in a research team where statistical analysis was delegated to a research assistant with experience doing statistical analysis. A sensible division of labour? Sure. Am I a little relieved that someone who knows what they are doing is in charge of that piece? Honestly, yes. Deep down, do I still want to be able to do it all? You better believe it. But maybe – just maybe – striving for a moderate level of statistical literacy and letting people with more expertise do the heavy lifting might not be such a bad idea after all. I do need to be able to make sense of data analysis when I see it, but whether I like it or not, it is very unlikely that I will have the opportunity to develop real statistical expertise in the foreseeable future.

As I understand it, one of the barriers to librarians conducting research is the intimidation factor. I wonder if more librarians would feel better about the idea of doing research if we embraced the idea that one doesn’t necessarily have to handle every aspect of the endeavour by oneself. Because sometimes you just need a statistician.

This article gives the views of the author and not necessarily the views of St. Michael’s Hospital, the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

Breaking the time barrier: Making time for research in a busy world

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by Denise Koufogiannakis
University of Alberta Libraries

Finding the time to do research is a huge issue that many librarians face. Research studies have shown that librarians perceive time as a barrier to both doing research and being an evidence based practitioner (Turner, 2002; Booth, 2011). My own research found that time was a determinant of evidence use by academic librarians. It acts as both a barrier and an enabler depending upon an individual’s circumstances, particularly with respect to their work environment (Koufogiannakis, 2013). In general, though, we usually think and talk about time as a barrier, so the focus is negative, often without any solutions to the problem being proposed.

I think one of the biggest issues in relation to time being a barrier is the “culture of busy” that surrounds us. A culture of busy is one where we talk about being “busy” as if it were a status symbol, a badge of honour, a way to show we are important and successful. It’s a way of bragging, masked within a complaint. But it is not meaningful. Unfortunately, we talk this way a lot, including in the workplace.

Busyness also an easy excuse for saying no to doing something, when you don’t want to dig deeper. It’s is way too easy to simply say “I’m too busy,” or, “I don’t have time,” without giving it a second thought. Sometimes you actually face a different barrier such as needing to improve your research skills, or not feeling confident enough to do research, but it is easier to just blame a lack of time.

In librarianship, I think we also worry that doing research is an ‘extra’ and that our peers will judge us negatively for doing research, especially during a time when we all seem to be doing more with less – that others will say, “if you had enough of a job – were as busy as me – you would not have any time for research”. This is the culture and attitude that we need to try and break! Librarian contributions to our profession through research are very important in order to tie research to areas of practice and advance knowledge in our field.

“It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” – Henry David Thoreau

I don’t want to dismiss librarians’ feeling that time is a barrier to doing research, but I do want to step back and ask that we start to think about what we might be able to do to make time, and how we can place time for research as a priority. Let’s reframe how we look at the time we have and where research fits within our overall landscape. We need to fight against the culture of busy that makes it much easier to simply say I don’t have time rather than figuring out how we can make time. Let’s start reframing our discussions in order to move toward a place where doing research is more important than being busy with a bunch of other “stuff”. Ultimately, this means looking at time as something that is ours individually to shape and take greater control over.

The premise that librarian research is important is key to all of this. If something is important then you will make time for it. It becomes about prioritizing all the things you have to do and not letting research always sink to the bottom. I’m not saying research has to be your top priority – for most librarians it is not. But if it is at all important to you and you want to do research, then you can prioritize it over other things, and find ways to make time for it.

How do we make this idea work in reality? It starts with being mindful about what you spend your time on, your priorities, what you want to achieve, and where research fits in that mix. Above all, do research that interests you, that you are passionate about, that you are curious about; research that will sustain and fulfil you. It’s also important to take a pragmatic approach to doing research – plan what you can reasonably achieve, schedule time for research just like anything else you do, set reminders, give yourself deadlines, aim for presentation or paper submission dates, and find someone who will push you along. If you are doing all or some of these things, research is going to become a normal part of your day, part of what drives you, and hopefully, something you want to keep doing and will make time for.

Let’s drop the busyness and take back our time to do research. Let’s make time because research is important to our profession. Let’s show one another that we can make time, and support one another in doing research so that it becomes a norm and something to be celebrated.

“You will never ‘find’ time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.” – Charles Bruxton

References

Booth, A. (2011). Barriers and facilitators to evidence-based library and information practice: An international perspective. Perspectives in International Librarianship, 2011(1). doi: 10.5339/pil.2011.1

Koufogiannakis, D. A. (2013). How academic librarians use evidence in their decision making: Reconsidering the evidence based practice model. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Aberystwyth University, Wales, U.K.

Turner, K. J. (2002). The use of applied library and information studies (LIS) research in New Zealand libraries. Library Review, 51(5), 230-240.

This blog post is based on a presentation given at the C-EBLIP Fall Symposium, October 14, 2014.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

Reflections on Research

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by Margy MacMillan
Mount Royal University Library

With apologies to Shakespeare: Some are born to research, some achieve research, and others have research thrust upon them . . . and it sometimes feel as though all three are true, often all at once. Whether research is something you have to do, love to do, or just plain do as a part of solving problems, reflecting on what aspects of the tasks YOU find most appealing might reveal some useful patterns.

How do I know this? I did the research! With me as a subject. Yes, it was as uncomfortable as it sounds, at least at first. Then it was… fun, and ultimately very helpful.
When I said I could talk about the What and the Why of research at the C-EBLIP Fall Symposium, I thought it would be easy. What could be simpler than expounding on the motivations for research and the questions that might arise? Teaching an elephant needlepoint. Does the Why lead to the What or vice versa – or do What and Why, the question to be investigated and the reason for the investigation have to occur at the same time? I started thinking in moebius loops where the What and Why become one another simultaneously.

Moebius photo

I searched for answers within. Why had I done research? Were there patterns in the questions? This research required a sunny day, a comfortable chair, and a beverage and was repeated until saturation was achieved. To keep track of reflections I developed a chart.

chart_blank

In filling out my chart, I realized I had NEVER looked at the whole pattern of my research experience. (Have you?) Using mixed methods, noting frequencies, and identifying themes emerging from the discourse, I was quite relieved to find there were patterns, although not always the patterns I thought I’d find. I also discovered connections between what I had thought were a series of random acts of research, and a path that led naturally to where I am now, at the intersection of EBLIP and SoTL – more about that in another post.

chart_filledin

It turns out, getting angry with the literature, borrowing from or intruding upon other disciplines and having a practical outcome have consistently been important to me. Some ‘ideal research conditions’ have changed over time – collaboration was not a key factor at the beginning of my library work but has become something I now seek out. As Dr. Vicki Williamson noted about library staffing in her presentation, research sometimes requires Buying, Building, Borrowing, Balancing and Blending.

In subsequent reflection on this reflection, my conditions for memorable research were not strict either/or conditions but points on continua. It’s not that I don’t like theory, it’s just that while I appreciate those who do, I’m drawn more to applied projects. This kind of realization means that while I may not always be able to control the What or the Why, by paying attention to the How, I can work toward more memorable, even enjoyable research experiences.

A comment in the session by Jo Ann Murphy at USask sparked yet more reflection. She talked about research we do on a regular basis – the kind of research that ends when the problem is solved, and not when the presentation is over. This ‘unsung’ research also requires refining questions, developing methods and analyzing results, we just don’t write about it much, and we should. It’s something we need to MAKE time for (thanks Denise Koufogiannakis!) individually so we can spend less time collectively answering the same questions.

On a final note, what a treat to be on the beautiful UofS campus in a room full of engaged, fascinating library folk, listening to an amazing range of presentations. I’m still processing what I heard, and hoping to network with more than a few of you for ideas/ tips/ tools and theories for my next projects.

The presentation is here. I invite you to chart your profile and comment on the common factors in YOUR memorable research experiences below. Hmmm, sounds like an interesting study…

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

On biting off a little more than you can chew

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by Lorie Kloda
Assessment Librarian, McGill University

Advice requested: Currently writing two manuscripts, one from a sabbatical that ended two years ago, and another from a recently completed research study. Also, data analysis from a third project is almost complete, and just began data collection on a fourth. Grant application for a follow-up study due in a month. Recently attended a conference and connected with a stellar researcher who wants to collaborate on nation-wide survey in an emerging area. Is a sixth research project one too many? Asking for a friend.

Sound familiar? Or perhaps unimaginable? For some, once the research bug hits, it can be hard to stop. For others, the idea of working on multiple research projects seems impossible. I find myself in the former group, always saying yes to new opportunities, starting a new research study before the current project is wrapped up. Sometimes I stop and ask myself, why am I doing this? Am I not just adding to already busy workload? Can I really do good quality research if I am trying to manage several vastly different projects simultaneously?

I decided that, yes, for me, having multiple research projects on the go is possible, and even ideal. I will try to present the case for taking on as much as (or, maybe a little more than) you can handle, when it comes to research.

Learn from your collaborators. Working on research with colleagues, including fellow librarians and other researchers, from within or outside your organization, can lead to a lot of new knowledge and skills. It’s also an added opportunity to learn how to work with different teams, sometimes in very different time zones. You can use the knowledge from one project to inform another.

Learn from, and about, yourself. Different stages of the research process require different abilities. Working on a project solo, or being responsible for an aspect of the research allows you to discover how you work best – be it that you prefer writing in a quiet, dark room late at night, or that you do, in fact, like making graphs and tables. You can then take this knowledge into other aspects of your work, and other research projects.

Experience with different methods and different topics. The more projects you get to work on, the more experience you obtain with different methods, and on different topics. This guarantees that you will not only increase your expertise over time, but that you will not likely get bored.

Contribute to the evidence base. Some individuals lament the dearth of high quality research in librarianship. If research is as important for practice as we claim, then we need to make the time to do the research that could inform our practice. As suggested by Pam Ryan and Denise Koufogiannakis in Librarianship and the Culture of Busy, “If something is important to you, make time for it.” Many research ideas arise because they are timely ¬– to the profession, not to your schedule.

All of the reasons above are good reasons to conduct research. But why get involved with multiple projects with overlapping timelines?

Research takes a long time. Anyone who has conducted research knows that there are times where the project stalls or is delayed: waiting for research ethics board approval, waiting for responses to a survey, waiting for a draft manuscript to be returned by a co-author. And, some stages of the research can be more appealing than others. When managing multiple projects, it is more likely that some aspect with engage you at a given moment. Use this momentum to push you in your other research projects. Because some research can take a lot a long time to complete, shorter projects can also provide a rewarding boost to one’s sense of accomplishment. Beginning a research study is a daunting undertaking, but being able to experience different stages of the research process at the same time can be stimulating.

In the grand scheme of things, juggling several research projects may not be the best strategy for everyone. But for some, it may be just the thing to get motivated. If you’ve had an idea bubbling away on the back burner for some time, or if you’ve been tempted by a colleague’s invitation to collaborate but always thought you should wait until that older project is finished, I would encourage you to reconsider.

My “friend” is still accepting advice, by the way.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

Traditionalists, Progressives and the Gone-Away World

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by Frank Winter, Librarian Emeritus
University Library, University of Saskatchewan

The question of what the role and mission of academic libraries and librarians should be has occupied my attention for a long time. My answers have evolved over time as circumstances have evolved. Underlying my answers, however, is my belief that every important factor in the evolving mission and role of university libraries is exogenous. We have no meaningful control or influence over the ecosystem of scholarly communication where Elsevier and its ilk and Google are the dominant players. In the Canadian context, the librarians responsible for data services, GIS services, and government documents saw their respective areas of responsibility restructure almost unrecognizably in real time over 3 years because of the exogenous forces of Open government information, Open data and Open GIS. Government goals for universities and university mission statements are developed without input from libraries. We react and try to shape these factors as best we can to meet our own values and goals based on the mission of the Library within the University.

Successfully engaging with these factors requires a clear understanding of how we interpret them and act on those interpretations. In this context, the rise to prominence of the work of cognitive scientists with respect to decision-making is important. In his Presidential Address at the 2013 annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association (published as “Policy, politics and political science,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 46(4), 751-772. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S000842391300084X) Dr. Michael Atkinson identified numerous decision-making pitfalls including framing, prospect theory, status quo bias, loss aversion, overconfidence bias, confirmation bias, my-side bias and recency bias. These pitfalls ought, in his opinion, to be much more formally incorporated into the theoretical underpinning of policy studies and political science. Atkinson notes, “In addition, we draw conclusions based on personally evocative but statistically dubious evidence.” As in policy studies, so in librarianship, I suggest. I would like to focus on another of these pitfalls – mindsets, the mental models of how the world ought to run – that each of us carries in our head.

At the present time, my thinking has focused on two different mindsets: the Traditionalist and the Progressive. Traditionalists are those librarians who believe that the overarching importance of the Library in the University is its local collection (consisting predominantly of published, almost exclusively English-language, secondary academic monographic literature, balanced and representative, and assembled for current and future scholars) and the services that support that local collection.

Progressives are those librarians who view “the Library” and its contributions to the host institution as a bundle of services of which the local collection (a subset of the collective collection) is one of the services.

When discussions arise that challenge a Traditionalist’s mindset, my experience is that evidence-based conclusions and proposals arising from those conclusions are often met with a combination of normative responses (“well, even if that is accurate it shouldn’t be given any weight given on this, that, or the other principle”) and heuristic, anecdotal empiricism (“I know my faculty members”) which are challenging to engage with.

As always, however, things are not black and white. It is quite possible, for example, that life science liaison librarians, for example, are Progressives by this definition and meet the needs for their users very well while humanities liaison librarians are predominantly Traditionalists because the relevant faculty members and graduate student users are traditionalists themselves. There is nothing wrong with that and this arguably is the correct approach to take. So perhaps, at a minimum, more precision and segmentation is needed when discussing options, not just referring to an undifferentiated lump called “the Library.”

But the heading that I now use when thinking about Traditionalist and Progessive mindsets is “the Gone-Away World.” This phrase is taken from the title of a very funny/ sad 2008 science fiction novel by Nick Harkaway. You can read the book yourself but in essence the title refers to a fearsome weapon (called the Go-Away weapon) developed to bring an end to an endless, ugly war between evenly-matched opponents. The weapon – some sort of entropy device – would cause the enemy to just “go away” by, as far as I could understand this narrative MacGuffin, causing information to decohere in the objects it is aimed at. Well, unintended consequences and all that (I think the author intended to show how the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the law of conservation of matter interacted in unexpected ways) but half the book deals with the results of deploying this weapon – the Gone-Away World.

I think, getting to the point, is that our Traditionalists are living (mostly) in a Gone-Away World. The traditional rationale for and way of delivering local collection-based services, traditional reference, traditional information literacy and so on has, for the most part, gone away but they act as if it were still in existence or perhaps are expecting a cyclical return to the status quo ante. Meanwhile, the Canadian tri-council granting agencies, planning processes from the university-wide to the local unit level, and professional bodies such as CARL, OCLC, and Ithaka S+R, among many others, have tried to explain why that world is no more and what roles libraries and librarians might play in the evolving world.

Re-reading these paragraphs I realize that I sound rather preachy. I have no reason to expect that I am any more insightful than any other person. There are lots of other opinions out there from some very informed, very engaged librarians and others who are engaged with issues of the library in the communities that they serve who see the world differently. But you can see some of this impact of these changes in many support staff positions lost over the past few years at MPOW. Many were dealing with physical stuff – stuff that has just Gone-Away. If the local collection of printed scholarly books by-and-large just Goes-Away as a useful and important service, what choice will we have as university libraries and university librarians but to adapt? Evidence-based solutions will be increasingly necessary for good decisions in this environment.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

Oh, the Humanities: A Literature Scholar Turned Librarian Ponders the Art and Science of Librarianship

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by Heidi LM Jacobs
Leddy Library, University of Windsor

When librarians with humanities backgrounds have an opportunity to meet and talk, I am struck by how we seem to cling to each other, relieved and grateful to have someone to talk with who understands us. It also strikes me as strange that while there are many, many academic librarians with backgrounds in the humanities, we feel so alone within LIS.

It seems unchallengeable that LIS is a social science: indeed it is and there is nothing at all wrong with this. Yet I often wonder what would happen if we thought about librarianship as a humanities endeavor, bringing together, as Denise Koufogiannakis writes, “the art and science of our profession”:

“We need to embrace both the science and the art of evidence based practice — otherwise, we will overlook important elements of the whole situation that practitioners work within. Doing so is not neat and tidy, but does that really matter? LIS is a social science, and the “social” implies “messy” because people and real-life situations are not easily controlled. The art of our craft allows us to embrace the messy situation, find ways to be creative, put our professional judgments to use and find the best solutions to meet the needs of individual users by applying the best of what we find in the research literature together with the best of what we know is likely to help this person.” (49)

I’m not at all disagreeing with Denise and the countless others who have called LIS a social science, but I do want to raise this question: what would happen if we called LIS a humanities subject? How would our ideas of evidence change? What kinds of evidence would we use? What kinds of evidence would inform the questions that we ask? Our decisions? Our profession?

In 2013, John Horgan published an interesting blog post on the Scientific American site called “Why Study Humanities? What I tell Engineering Freshman.” This post raises ideas that pick up on points I made in my last blog post and helps me think more fully about what the humanities could offer librarianship in terms of both research and practice.

Horgan writes, “We live in a world increasingly dominated by science. And that’s fine. I became a science writer because I think science is the most exciting, dynamic, consequential part of human culture, and I wanted to be a part of that.”

“But,” he goes on to argue, that “it is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you’re given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, “This is how things are.” They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt, skepticism.”

“The humanities,” Horgan tells his students, “are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. . . The humanities are more about questions than answers, and we’re going to wrestle with some ridiculously big questions in this class.”

I’m particularly drawn to Horgan telling his students that they are going to “wrestle with some ridiculously big questions.” It seems to me that if we focus our research and our inquiry into things that we can count or quantify or that we can collect a particular kind of evidence about, then we’re scaling back the questions we can ask about our practice and our profession.

Literature students are trained to ask questions, look for fissures in logic, notice how meaning can hang on a single word or the placement of a comma. We look for the silences and gaps that reveal significant things through omission or silences. We are taught to question continuously. We are taught that never arriving at an answer is perfectly fine as the journey of asking questions is not only valid, it’s vital. In short, we are taught that things that you cannot count do count.

As an information literacy librarian, I continually bring questions to my students: where is this information coming from? Who wrote it? Who is presenting or sponsoring this information? Who is benefitting from having this particular kind of information published? What kinds of information aren’t we finding, why might that be? While we cannot always answer these questions definitively or answer them without a qualifier like “it depends,” it is imperative that we ask these questions of them and with them.

I want our profession to embody what we teach our students about information: doubt it, question it, be skeptical, be critical. It is not that I am against quantifiable evidence but I want to ensure we are using it carefully and critically and not complacently. And also that we don’t exclude other kinds of evidence that – though it cannot be counted – still counts.

Horgan concludes his essay arguing the point of the humanities is that they “keep us from being trapped by our own desire for certainty.” Librarianship is at a point where we are bombarded by “some ridiculously big questions” and if we limit our inquiries to what we can answer, prove, quantify, and chart, we’re doing ourselves and our profession a disservice.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

Counting What You Cannot Count Or, A Literature Scholar Turned Librarian Ponders the Meaning of Evidence

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by Heidi LM Jacobs
Leddy Library, University of Windsor

The first sentence I wrote for this blog post was this: “Perhaps this isn’t the best way to start a blog post for C-EBLIP but I have a confession to make: I am deeply suspicious of evidence.” The more I wrote, the more I realized that everyone is (or should be) deeply suspicious of evidence. We need to think about it carefully and critically and ask the difficult questions of it. The more I wrote about my distrust of evidence, the more I realized that it wasn’t evidence per se that gave me pause, but how evidence is generally defined and approached in LIS.

I think what I really meant when I said “I am deeply suspicious of evidence” is that I am deeply suspicious of numbers and the concept of “indisputable facts.” There are always, I think, more sides to the story than numbers can convey and when I see charts, figures, and graphs, I am always looking for the other parts of the story, the absent narratives, the “random dots,” the findings off the grid. What are the things these numbers aren’t telling us?

My feelings toward evidence could easily be explained by the fact that I am a literature scholar turned information literacy librarian. In both fields, we are trained to look at “evidence” in particular ways. My next blog post will consider what humanities-based modes of thinking could contribute to evidence based library and information practice (EBLIP) but in this post I’d like to pick up something that Denise Koufogiannakis (2013) raised in her EBLIP7 keynote. She observed that “EBLIP’s focus to date has been on research evidence and how to read and understand research better. This is a good thing (I certainly do not want to diminish the importance of the work that has been done in this respect)–but it is not the only thing–and we must begin to explore other types of evidence” (9).

Like Denise, I do not want to diminish the importance of the work being done in EBLIP and my questions about EBLIP are not to challenge or undermine the work done in this area. Rather, in this blog post, I want to respond to what I read as an invitation from Denise to “explore other types of evidence.” What other evidence types might there be? And what might these other types of evidence contribute to EBLIP, to research, and to librarianship? In this and my next blog post, I will be pondering some of these issues and invite others to join me in thinking through these ideas.

As I read in the field of EBLIP, I often wonder where librarians like me, with ties to the humanities, might fit in with evidence-based work. But as I write this, I pause because it’s not that my research, practice, teaching, and thinking aren’t informed by evidence—it’s just that the kind of evidence I summon, trust, and use is not easily translated into what usually constitutes “evidence,” formally and informally. Perhaps I am the kind of librarian who Denise (2012) describes here: “The current model may be alienating some librarians who feel that the forms of evidence they are using are not being recognized as important” (6). One cannot quantify theoretical thoughts or chart reflective practice; some researchers might view this kind of evidence as soft at best, inadmissible at worst.

For a while I thought it might make sense, as the song says, for me and EBLIP to call the whole thing off. However, the more I think about EBLIP the more I think there might be something worth considering. I realize that it’s not that I distrust evidence: I am skeptical of a certain kind of evidence. Or, phrased another way, I trust a different kind of evidence, a kind of evidence I don’t often see reflected in EBLIP.

My argument is not that EBLIP needs to change so that those of us with humanities backgrounds and humanities ways of thinking feel personally included or intellectually welcome in EBLIP endeavours. My argument is, instead, that humanities ways of thinking about evidence could offer EBLIP perspectives and approaches that might take us in new directions in our thinking, research, scholarship, and practice.

For those of us working with students and information literacy, we know that we can attempt to understand their experiences quantitatively or explore their thoughts and habits qualitatively. But again, to my mind, these kinds of studies are only part of the information literacy story: findings need to be contextualized, studies problematized, evidence questioned, “random dots” explored, premises and practices reflected upon and theorized. When we consider students—or any segment of user communities—in library scholarship we need to remember that we are studying complex, changeable people who themselves cannot be reduced into charts and graphs. Any “answers” we may find may raise more questions, and arguably, they should.

EBLIP’s suitability for helping us make decisions has been well-explored and theorized. I’m wondering if we could also use evidence—writ large—to help us ask new questions of our practices, our selves, our research and our profession.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

Taking Time for Research

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by Kristin Hoffmann
Associate Librarian, University of Western Ontario

Usually I have to make time for research in my daily work life. This past year, I was fortunate to be able to take time for research by going on a sabbatical leave. I highly recommend a sabbatical for any librarian who has the opportunity to take one.

In a study conducted by Leona Jacobs of the University of Lethbridge and presented at the 2007 CLA conference, librarians who had taken sabbaticals said that their experience was “refreshing,” “fabulous,” and “energizing.” They also said that it was “hard work but … quite interesting.” My sabbatical experience was definitely all of those things!

Kristin Hoffman

Here are a few specific things that I realized about research from the process of doing my sabbatical:

A sabbatical is a good time to really delve into an area. I had done a research project related to the development of librarians’ professional identity, and I knew that I wanted to continue to focus on professional identity. As I was thinking about possible professional identity-related projects, I kept telling myself, “I’ll need to do more background reading before I can write my application.” Finally I realized that I could use the sabbatical to do the background reading. That was a good choice: I now have a much fuller sense of my research agenda, and I feel more like a ‘real’ researcher, knowing that I have such an intimate familiarity with my research areas.

A sabbatical is also a good time to try something new. I focused on research areas that weren’t new to me (librarians as practitioner-researchers, as well as professional identity), but my previous research had been with qualitative or quantitative approaches and during my sabbatical I wanted to try synthesizing my background reading with a critical/theoretical approach. It was a big stretch for me—my undergraduate education was in Engineering Physics—and it was frustrating and difficult at times, but I felt like I had really achieved something by breaking out of my research comfort zone.

Know your work style and make sure you can work that way on sabbatical. For me, this meant that I needed to have people with whom I could talk about my research, because I often develop my thoughts much better through conversation. Working with co-researchers was one way I did that, and I am fortunate to have a partner who is an academic, was also on sabbatical, and is interested in my research. I also attended conferences where there was a fit with my research interests, and had some great conversations with conference presenters and attendees.

Doing research is one of my favourite things about being an academic librarian, and the chance to focus on research during my sabbatical was wonderful. I learned a lot about myself as a researcher, and as a librarian.

If you have taken a sabbatical, how did it affect your research? If you are planning one, what are you hoping to achieve with your research?

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.