The potential for partnership in evidence-based library practice

How can evidence-based practice in libraries be experienced as a shared process (with and for communities)?

I’ve been considering the relationship between partnership and evidence-based library and information practice (EBLIP). Starting from a students as partners approach, I found little that considered partnership approaches or pedagogies in light of evidence-based decision-making in libraries.  While various library sectors, assessment practices, and methodologies demonstrate co-design and participatory research, these didn’t quite respond to the questions or context I was working with.

Two reasons for this may be:

• Student partnership (in Australian university libraries) has “unrealised potential” and its literature is “underdeveloped compared to classroom or governance contexts.” ¹
• When placing partnership and evidence together we risk seeing “partnership as a means to seek and gather data to identify student trends,” instead of “valuing partnership for each student’s unique lived experience.” ².

This, however, is also where partnership has the potential to strengthen our approaches to evidence-based practice in libraries by reducing the transactional (and sometimes distant) quality of evidence, while also challenging us to consider who benefits from the evidence we’re collecting.

Looking to students as partners initiatives, ‘service improvement’ is identified as a high-priority area in university libraries and we also see shared decision-making as a key principle for partnership. Both decision-making and service improvement reflect much of EBLIP’s purpose.

Library decision-making

Many collaborative pedagogies in library practice are already amenable to partnership in service co-design and knowledge co-creation. We see this in advocacy for open pedagogy.

As Clare O’Hanlon describes, we can be “advocating for open pedagogy and renewable assessments to help students become co-creators of knowledge and be empowered to share their work.” By collaborating with students and academics we contribute “with and for communities.”

Additionally, many library learning and teaching frameworks and strategies emphasise collaboration. We’re striving to engage student perspectives in the design of our library services, resources, and spaces and we have opportunities for partnership in “decision-making, implementation, investigation, or analysis.” ³  These processes are all part of EBLIP.

We often, however, engage in problem-solving that involves conflicting values. Howard and Davis describe these as problems with “complex interrelationships and interdependencies because the clients, stakeholders and context are different for each problem and subject to continuous change.” ⁴  That is – complex challenges and wicked problems.

Howard and Davis suggested integrating design thinking into evidence-based practice to solve complex challenges. Similarly, I’m wondering what potential there is to integrate partnership into our EBLIP models for decision-making, while considering the motives, principles, and theoretical basis of each.

Some questions

So – of course – I have questions:

• To what extent do we already engage with partnership in EBLIP? When we do, how are we conceptualising partnership in EBLIP models?
• Are we viewing partnership and evidence as distinct practices or in dialogue?
• How does partnership impact our understanding of ‘best available’ evidence and its appraisal?
• Will partnership move evidence for service improvement beyond being transactional?
• Can partnership (from the outset) see the use of evidence earlier in our practice?
• Would partnership keep EBLIP from being relegated to assessment at the end of a project and instead provide an opportunity for evidence-based decision-making across a project’s entire course?

The overlap

In evidence-based practice, the pace of translating and applying evidence, especially at the organisational level, can be challenging. The same is seen in students as partners initiatives. Peseta et al. describe how students “puzzle at how their everyday student experiences in classrooms and online, remain relatively untouched by the aspirations we are working towards in our partnership endeavours.”⁵

The questions asked by Peseta et al., such as “Who gets to determine and report the success criteria of partnership initiatives and by what measures?,” ⁶  are similar to questions that may (I would argue should) be asked in EBLIP. They direct our attention to the values of students (and other library users) and are a necessary reflection on the dynamics of partnership and power.

We know partnership can inform library decision-making and learning and teaching, but it also has the potential to be recognised as evidence during this process. This does, however, mean conceptualising evidence as including lived experience and not reducing partnership to the identification of student trends. ⁷ Looking outside of our profession, to conversations in evidence-based policy, may help guide conversations on the context and validity of our evidence in libraries as it relates to users.

Potential for partnership in EBP

Applying a partnership approach (or pedagogy where appropriate) to evidence and its interpretation, we have greater opportunities to engage with student voices as lived experiences in our practices, frameworks, and strategies. This ‘input’ may help to:

1. Re-evaluate what we consider measures or indicators of success and impact.
2. Articulate the why of the pedagogies we engage in, improving the communication of outreach and strategy.
3. Increase methodological and evidence diversity and support a “more mature understanding of partnership.”⁸

Engaging with the overlap between evidence and partnership in libraries means evaluating the extent to which partnerships contribute to our decision-making processes. Lucy Mercer-Mapstone challenges the inner circle of expertise in the partnership movement, writing:

“Partnership, however, inherently challenges normative notions of expertise – opening up exclusive conceptions of knowledge to embrace plural knowledges as necessary” (2019, p. 123).

So, I’m interested in how we can expand (and at times challenge) our conceptions of professional knowledge and expertise as evidence through partnership. This could require shifting partnership from the realm of ‘local evidence’ (I.e., feedback) to ‘knowledge’ to better reflect the shift toward equal responsibility and respond to power imbalances in decision-making. These are all principles that a reciprocal partnership approach lends itself to that we don’t always actively consider in evidence-based practice.

Just as Howard and Davis describe a hybrid between design-thinking and EBLIP as one that “redefines what we might consider to be ‘evidence’, and involves collaboration and engagement,” ⁹ we have similar potential for embedding the principles that drive partnership in evidence-based practice.

Partnership can provide opportunities to meaningfully engage students’ experiential and tacit knowledge, as expertise and lived experience, and then as evidence. This can relies on the 6A’s process of EBLIP but positions evidence-based decision-making as a shared process for mutual benefit. We can build on existing opportunities to elevate student voices and then consider how these voices relate to our evidence base and whether our evidence addresses user-centered understandings and priorities.

Approached with care, there is potential to see evidence-based practice in libraries as a shared process. We might start by identifying where there are opportunities for evidence-based decision-making built on partnership, with and for communities.

1. Dollinger et al., 2022, p. 3 [↩]
2. Ibid., p. 10 [↩]
3. Cook-Sather, Bovill and Felten, 2014, 7 [↩]
4. Howard & Davis, 2011, 16 [↩]
5. Peseta et al., 2021, p. 269 [↩]
6. Ibid., al., 268 [↩]
7. Dollinger et al., 2022, 14-15 [↩]
8. Ibid., 12 [↩]
9. Howard & Davis, 2011, 19 [↩]