PETER BROPHY

Biography: Peter Brophy is Director of the Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) at the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and holds the Chair in Information Management at that University. He is the author of The Library in the Twenty-First Century (Facet, 2001) and The Academic Library (Facet, 2 nd ed., 2005) . Before moving to MMU in 1998, he was Head of Library and Learning Resource Services, and of the Learning Technologies Centre, at the University of Central Lancashire. His earlier career included posts at the Universities of Lancaster and Strathclyde and at the then Teesside and Bristol Polytechnics. He is a Fellow and Honorary Fellow of CILIP, and was President of the Institute of Information Scientists in 1998-99.

Title: 'Researching practice or practising research?'

Summary: This presentation questions the application of evidence-based practice (EBP) to librarianship and asks what needs to be done to enable practitioners to base their decision-making on the hard evidence produced by robust research. However, it is also noted that in health sciences – where EBP originated – there is concern that even when the evidence is available it is not always applied consistently. Among the responses to this dilemma is the emergence of narrative-based medicine. The paper asks whether we need to move beyond evidence-based librarianship to embrace a narrative-based librarianship which would contextualize available evidence by placing value on the use of storytelling techniques to achieve real impact. ‘Evidence' is then seen as encompassing context, judgement and interpretation as well as ‘facts'. To achieve this we need a human-centred approach to library management and decision making, and we need to learn important lessons from social science research.