Practicing What We Preach: A case Study on the Application of Evidence-Based Practice to Inform Decision Making for Public Services Staffing in an Academic Health Sciences Library

Abstract

When a new director of the Health Sciences Library at McMaster was appointed in April 2008, part of her mandate was to carry out an operational review of the library. A recent physical renovation had updated the library space to meet the needs of the twenty-first century learning environment; the next priority was to look at “renovating” the services and resources offered in the space.

Since McMaster is the birthplace of evidence-based practice, the decision was made to gather enough data to provide sound evidence to support the outcome of the operational review and to inform staffing and service design decisions. A mixed method strategy was devised to be flexible enough to meet both the short time frame and shifting data gathering demands of the project. Many of the tools used where influenced by observational study techniques. Although not statistically significant, the results provided enough evidence about who was using the library and how they interact with physical service points to make informed decisions. The design and use of data collection tools illustrate the first steps towards building a model for the implementation of evidence based decision making.

Keywords:

• academic health sciences libraries
• operational review
• evidence-based practice
• observational methods