In Praise of Librarians

I’ve spent a lot of time this summer on two web-based projects. The first one is this blog. The second is developing www.evidence-basedmanagement.com, which will go live in a week or so. Jeff Pfeffer and I decided to develop a website and blog to bring together information about evidence-based management , as well as people in industry and academia who are interested in fueling an evidence-based management movement. We soon recruited PhD student Ralph Maurer (who will be teaching a class on evidence-based management with me next year), and two librarians from the Stanford Business School Library to help us with this adventure, Daphne Chang and Paul Reist.

I confess that, when we started this adventure, I was delighted to have help from just about any smart person to get it done. I didn’t really think much about whether their skills as librarians would help. As the summer has progressed, however, I’ve realized that the rise of the web, blogs, Wikipedia, and all that easily available information might reduce the need for trips to the library for some of us, but – although their roles are changing – it has also made the need for librarians even greater than ever.  There is an ever growing pile of information out there and it keeps getting harder and harder to tell what is true and what is not.

Librarians like Daphne and Paul have become even more important because they care about facts and accuracy and are extremely skilled at finding sources – so they can actually help stop the spread of claims that are wrong or inaccurate and can find the true sources of ideas and claims that are actually correct.  Daphne and Paul love things that are true, usually figure what is true and what is false, and if that isn’t possible, can show you why something that you thought was true can’t be verified. As we’ve developed the site, they constantly find and correct mistakes (including those on blogs), track down where ideas came from, and find new sources that we never knew about. We’ve learned that librarians can play key roles in the evidence-based management movement, and have learned to view Daphne and Paul as key partners in this adventure, as people who do the work with us rather than for us.

We aren’t the first to discover how valuable librarians can be to practicing an evidence-based approach. Dr. David Sackett , a driving force behind the modern evidence-medicine movement, has long worked with his colleagues to recruit and train medical librarians to review and evaluate studies in medical journals. Much as in the management literature, there are huge numbers of studies published in medical journals, and many (Sackett says over 90%) are so flawed that the resulting recommendations can’t be trusted to guide how doctors treat their patients. Physicians are not only too busy to read many of these studies, they are often not well-enough versed in research methods to know which studies to believe.  Medical librarians now play a key role in the evidence-based medicine movement, helping review and judge published studies and helping  physicians find the best treatments for their patients.  For example, the primary goals of The Evidence-Based Medicine Resource Center in New York include: 1. Provide health practitioners and librarians with education and training in evidence-based medicine, and on the information resources and the computer competencies necessary to teach and practice evidence-based medicine and 2. Provide librarians with the skills to work in partnership with clinicians in accessing and managing clinical medical information.   And their EBM Librarian’s Working Group includes 14 librarians from at least 10 different medical libraries. 

In short, although the rise of the web has changed what librarians do, it also means that we need them more than ever because there are so many facts out there now and they are so easy to get, and it is so hard to tell which ones to believe – and they actually care about facts and evidence, and know where to get them. Indeed, as I understand it, this partly why many major universities – like The University of Michigan and University of California at Berkeley – have renamed their old library schools to “Information” schools.

PS: If you want an accessible overview of evidence-based medicine, check out this article in Family Practice Medicine.

Comments

[benny05]

Librarians are about engagement on all sorts of levels, in my view, Bob. Appreciate reading the accolades for the librarians who are part of your engagement team. I'm looking forward to seeing more about evidenced-based management, and glad to see Jeffrey Pfeffer is a willing collaborator, especially to this blog. Cheers.

[Jeff the Poustman]

Great point regarding folks who help determine not just location, but validity, of information. An increasingly vital role without a doubt.

[Bob Sutton]

Kent,

We are trying to assemble such lists, but unlike medicine, I think things just aren't that organized yet around the term "evidence-based management." We are trying, but are decades behind of course. And, that aside, one of the problems with management is that anyone seems to be capable of being labelled as an expert, even fictional characters like Santa Claus and Tony Soprano!

[Kent Blumberg]

I am looking forward to the opening of your new website.

In the meantime, I followed the link about David Sackett and found an article about making evidence-based medicine (EBM) doable (http://www.aafp.org/fpm/20040200/51maki.html#box_a).

The article contained a great list of EBM resources to help practicing physicians sort out the good ideas from the crap. Are you aware of any such list of resources for Evidence-based management - or is that something we might see on your coming web site? It would certainly help us practicing leaders as much as the EBM list helps practicing physicians.

Kent M. Blumberg
email: [email protected]
blog: http://www.kentblumberg.com