Research: the opportunity wheel keeps turning

Abstract

Last week, a twenty-eight-year-old clinician came to our library to be oriented. She wanted to know what was available online and pulled out her iPhone from her lab coat pocket. She wanted me to show her the applications she needed not only to access clinical and drug information, but also to access our other library resources, including online journals and information databases. It was clear she had no plans to come to the library ever again nor to sit at her computer in her office looking for information. This jolted me once more into recognition of how our health sciences librarianship field is changing. This clinician is not alone. More than 70% of physicians are now using smart phones, and the number is increasing [1]. We can expect many, if not most, will want to use their smart phones as their standard portal to the medical library. Of course, this is not surprising. As a profession, we have anticipated changes: changes in how information is supplied to us and how we supply it to our patrons. And change always presents research opportunities. The Medical Library Association (MLA) has set priorities to address our changing professional environment and its opportunities for research. The latest list was set in 2008 by the MLA Research Section Research Agenda Committee. The 2008 research list built on MLA's history of research interest. MLA issued its first research policy, Using Scientific Evidence to Improve Information Practice, in 1995 [2]. This was about the same time that evidence-based practice began in the field of medicine, when the value of applying evidence from outcomes research to improve treatment was recognized. The importance of making decisions based on evidence from outcomes research began to be recognized in other job fields, and the same principles were applied to library services. MLA's 1995 policy was a commitment to foster research by the membership and specifically to build a foundation of evidence, according to at least one observer [3]. Ten years later, in 2005, an MLA task force reviewed and updated the 1995 research policy. This task force conducted semi-structured interviews with information professionals and library students from various libraries to gain views of what MLA's role should be in research. This produced a revised and updated research policy, The Research Imperative, which was presented to the MLA Board of Directors in 2007 [4]. Suzanne Grefsheim, FMLA, and colleagues described this task force's approach and its research in the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) the following year, 2008 [5]. Their paper reaffirmed MLA's commitment to research. It also highlighted the needs for librarians to gain a solid knowledge foundation for research and to put evidence-based results into their practice. Perhaps more importantly, it suggested that MLA needed to develop and provide a supportive culture for its members to grow as researchers. Some of the recommended goals were to identify a research agenda, advocate access to and support of library and information science research, foster collaborations, and educate MLA members to conduct better research. The article included a recommendation to develop a Research Section subcommittee that would identify the most important research questions for health sciences librarianship.