Six domains of evidence-based information practice

Abstract

In a pivotal address at the 2001 first Evidence Based Librarianship Conference in Sheffield, UK, Crumley and Koufogiannakis (2002) proposed that the discipline of evidence-based information practice could be organized within the following six domains, based upon the major areas dealt with in daily practice for librarians: • Reference/enquiries – providing services and access to information that meets the needs of library users • Education – finding teaching methods and strategies to educate users about library resources and how to improve their research skills • Collections – building a high-quality collection of print and electronic materials that is useful, cost-effective and meets user needs • Management – managing people and resources within an organization • Information access and retrieval – creating better systems and methods for information retrieval and access • Marketing/promotion – promoting the profession, the library and its services to both users and non-users. They went on to observe the usefulness of this approach as a contribution to the evidence-based practice process: ‘As with EBHC, matching librarianship questions with one of the above domains can help librarians decide where to search and the appropriate search terms they should use to answer that type of question. This also allows librarians to focus upon what they are really asking, rather than permitting the question to snowball in many different directions’. Structure of ‘domain chapters’ We have decided to use this structure to present a brief overview of the main types of study, with illustrative examples, in each domain. Although this prototypic taxonomy is by no means perfect – staff development probably merits a category in its own right and the evidence base for knowledge management will imminently command its own category – like the originators themselves we believe it to be a useful parallel to the evidence-based healthcare paradigm. Each principal chapter in Part 3 follows a similar pattern – after a brief introduction and consideration of the definition of the domain it proceeds to look at the most relevant sources of evidence and the general quantity and quality of research. It then examines principal examples of evidence-based practice designs such as systematic reviews and randomized controlled trials before considering designs with special importance to that domain.

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