Most Recent Issue of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice

The most recent issue of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, an open access, peer reviewed journal that is published quarterly and hosted at the University of Alberta.

Articles that caught my attention include:

• Library Assessment and Quality Assurance - Creating a Staff-Driven and User-Focused Development Process: "Gothenburg University Library has implemented a process with the goal to combine quality assurance and strategic planning activities. The process has bottom-up and top-down features designed to generate strong staff-involvement and long-term strategic stability... In 2008 the library started implementing a system in which each library team should state a number of improvement activities for the upcoming year. In order to focus the efforts, the system has gradually been improved by closely coupling a number of assessment activities, such as surveys and statistics, and connecting the activities to the long-term strategic plan of the library."
• Educating Assessors: Preparing Librarians with Micro and Macro Skills: "To examine the fit between libraries’ needs for evaluation skills, and library education and professional development opportunities. Many library position descriptions and many areas of library science education focus on professional skills and activities, such as delivering information literacy, designing programs, and managing resources. Only some positions, some parts of positions, and some areas of education specifically address assessment/evaluation skills... Four bodies of evidence were examined for the prevalence of assessment needs and assessment education: the American Library Association core competencies; job ads from large public and academic libraries; professional development courses and sessions offered by American Library Association (ALA) divisions and state library associations; and course requirements contained in ALA-accredited Masters of Library Science (MLS) programs. "
• Evaluating Approaches to Quality Assessment in Library and Information Science LIS Systematic Reviews: A Methodology Review: "Systematic reviews are becoming increasingly popular within the Library and Information Science (LIS) domain. This paper has three aims: to review approaches to quality assessment in published LIS systematic reviews in order to assess whether and how LIS reviewers report on quality assessment a priori in systematic reviews, to model the different quality assessment aids used by LIS reviewers, and to explore if and how LIS reviewers report on and incorporate the quality of included studies into the systematic review analysis and conclusions."