You say ‘research’, I say ‘tomato’…

The US and UK were once memorably described by George Bernard Shaw (allegedly…) as “two nations separated by a common language”. Anyone who has worked on a large-scale project will know what he meant — it is all-too-common for large groups of highly intelligent people to work together for long periods of time only to discover that they had fundamentally different definitions of the concepts at the heart of their work.

Recently, it has become apparent to me that several library and information sector initiatives I’m either involved in or leading on have been labouring under just such an issue — fundamentally different ideas about common core expressions — with often significant implications for our work.

The expressions are these: “research”, “evidence”, “data” and “statistics”.

This is important. As a profession, librarians and information professionals are driving positive change in a wide range of industries and sectors, including often in circumstances in which our role and value are not well-understood.

When confronted by stakeholders who either see information as a problem that has been solved by technology or who do not fundamentally possess a mental framework of what we do and why we do it, there’s no use throwing our hands in the air and saying “this is hopeless, they just don’t ‘get it’”. we have to be able to present them with compelling evidence of our worth that is expressed in terms which they both understand and will engage with.

Perhaps more fundamentally than this, the use of evidence to inform our work is at the very centre of our ethics as information professionals. ‘Evidence-based practice’ is one of the three core values in We Are CILIP, our 5-year strategy and action plan.

Evidence-based practice is the basis of trust, and trust is arguably the most important banner under which we are hoping to march in an age that is being defined by ‘post-truth’, mis- and dis-information.

And there are parts of the library, information and knowledge community where evidence-based practice is absolutely core to the day-to-day work. If you look at the role of librarians and knowledge specialists in health, for example, evidence-based practice is absolutely intrinsic to our professional identity.

Evidence-based practice ought to be core to our professional identity in all of the contexts in which librarians, information managers and knowledge managers work. It should drive the decisions we make, guide our services and amplify our advocacy.

[to be continued…]