WOSB (We Only Stamp Books) at EBLIP10, Glasgow

In this post we want to tell you a story. A story of how Luca enjoyed his first ever ceilidh dancing. A story of how Elena convinced Luca to join the dance floor. And a story of how I (Laura) learned more about systematic reviews (I know, interesting, but not as exciting!). We are going to tell you about our experience at EBLIP10 (10th International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference), which was held at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow) between 17-19 June 2019.

As for the CILIPS Conference, we thought it would be a good idea to write a WOSB post about our participation in this professional event, both to exercise our reflective writing and to give an account of the conference to those who were not able to attend. We recommend to have a look at the Conference abstracts here: https://www.eblip10.org/Portals/96/EBLIP10Abstracts.pdf and to the Twitter handle @ConfEblip or search for #eblip10.
Besides being eager to learn more about evidence based practice in our sector, we were particularly keen to attend, since two of the lecturers who taught us during the MSc at Strathclyde were Chairing the Committee (well done Diane and Becky!).

Laura
Unfortunately, unlike Luca and Elena, I did not manage to attend the entire conference, but I went to one of the pre-conference workshops held on Sunday 16 June:

“Information overload: using the systematic review to support evidence-based practice” - Claire Wiley, Belmont University, USA Meggan Houlihan, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE Amanda Click, American University, USA Why would you bother getting up to attend a workshop on systematic reviews on a Sunday morning? I did actually think that when I stumbled out of bed. However, it wasn’t bad at all! I thought it was engaging and well delivered, with a good balance of theory, examples of method applications and practice. I wanted to find out whether systematic reviews is something that would be beneficial to apply in my day-to-day job. Systematic reviews strive to identify all literature on a chosen topic. However, there will always be limitations, both external (e.g., paywalls) and internal to the research (that is, the need for setting inclusion and exclusion criteria, since you cannot possibly deal with all the data available out there).

Some key takeaways from the session: Be thoughtful when choosing your team (they need to be detail-oriented and with a good amount of time available!) Keep track of everything and hold regular meetings Be consistent, but flexible when designing your research

Elena
As Laura said, the EBLIP10 Conference was a thrilling experience, which gave us such a great chance for networking, meeting LIS professionals and researchers from different countries. The wealth of research that was presented at the conference offered considerable intellectual nourishment. So much nourishment, that after the third day we had some kind of mental indigestion!

I feel that a word should be spent on the great keynotes delivered by John Scally (NLS), David Stewart (CILIP president), Frankie Wilson (Bodleian Libraries) and Donna Sheeder (Library of Congress and IFLA). They set and shaped the tone of the conference with one simple, but powerful concept: stories. Research is essential to understand users’ needs, how to meet them, how to make the Information and Library service work at their best. However, to be effective, when presenting the outcomes of a research, this should be done through stories, real stories. As John Scally said during the Opening Session, researchers should be “Humanising facts and evidence” because “stories beat statistics”. I believe this is very powerful and it has been reflected in all the different presentations of the conference.

It is difficult to choose what research to write about in this post: all the sessions were characterised by thrilling speeches. However, we have to make a choice and here is our selection:

“Work IT –how libraries can deliver digital support for employability and the lessons for wider digital inclusion” – Angela Short, Lindsay McKrell The outcome of this research was presented at the Digital and Media Literacy session. This study was conducted across the public libraries of Stirling Council. The need of such study emerged following the rise of job-seeking related enquiries that libraries are receiving, hence the necessity of understanding what is the impact libraries have on employability. This had never been captured by research before. The outcomes of this study have highlighted how there is a need to create stronger partnerships, in and out the Stirling Council area, in order to give a more targeted response to this very specific need of the public library users.

“Measuring the value of California's public libraries” - Cheryl Stenstrom and Natalie Cole Another research on public libraries, this time involving those of the State of California and funded by the California State Librarian. From this research it was found that libraries are used to access information, as well as a space for inclusion and development. Public libraries have a unique combination of people, space and resources. And it’s a free service! One of the research questions was asking if, considering the social value that public libraries have, the Return on Investment (RoI) is actually the right way of looking at things when evaluating public libraries. This is a relevant question that applies to all public libraries, not only those in the State of California: I am thinking about Scottish public libraries and, more closely, at the research aforementioned, Work IT, which highlighted how public libraries have such a strong impact on the community, giving users a real tool to help them in the process of looking for jobs (from the creation of CVs to applying for them).

Luca
I was hooked by the mind-blowing presentations I chose to attend during the EBLIP10 and I was really impressed by the first bold sentence by the opening keynote, John Scally, ‘Evidence is boring’: put in perspective, John Scally affirmation make sense, especially when looked at retrospectively. Yes, evidence per se might be boring, when presented as arid numbers, but only because those very numbers are not engaging. To engage audiences, advocate for our profession and influence the stakeholders we need to tell a story, even when using data. As noted by Elena above, this has been one of the leitmotifs of the conference, and I firmly believe that this will be one of the main lessons I can take in my everyday practice.

I have to make a difficult selection amongst the well presented and engaging presentation, unfortunately it is a matter of our time as writers and your time as readers. But the abstracts are available on the conference website, as noted above!

“Using qualitative methods to demonstrate value and impact” - Susan Archimbault. Using LibGuides and library website to deliver information is useful to reach the entire university students community but, I guess it comes with some catches, like losing contact with the very community. Susan showed us how this could affect the reception of the information and what they did to improve it. This can be replicated easily in any context, and it is worth to suggest to library leaders and such. Ask patrons for feedback, evaluate and eventually take up the suggestions, and check again with users. It is necessary to see how the use of the previous system performs against the new one! And I am positive this can be used in all our public libraries information pages too, sometimes so dense with information and not always immediate for our patrons.

“How do students evaluate news” - Doreen Bradlewy and Craig Smith Working in a school library, this session on information literacy has been eye-opening. After showing the results on a research on relations between news consumption and political preferences for university students, the speakers invited the audience to think about how it is actually important to shift the focus from “a selection of trustworthy sources” to actually teach students how to evaluate the sources, with cross checking, reverse image search and the like. I sometimes focus on ‘reliable sources’ when teaching information literacy in schools, but I also teach students how to evaluate sources, so I agree with this presentation findings and appreciate that I should further shift my focus on evaluation procedures.

And on the last day, when I thought I could not put anything new in my mind already expanded to the limit, on the very last parallel session I attended, both the talks gave me even more food or thought! Hillary Bussel and Tatiana Bryant exposed the results of their research on gender identities, sexual orientation and library performance: people (patrons and librarians alike) expect certain genders to perform in a stereotyped way (e.g. women need to be feminine and always happy to help with information requests, and they have a dress code to adhere to), and credibility for gender non conforming librarians seems to be perceived by the same librarians as somewhat negatively affected. It is some sort of hyper awareness of how people react to our external appearance that affects the performance of staff. Identifying myself as LGBT too, I felt this talk was very close and I am also aware that I do sometimes overthink what other people think about my professionalism because I have a ‘flamboyant personality’, as noted by some colleagues, sometimes affecting the perception I have of my performance too. So, while this talks brought more awareness in my practice and will make me challenge my own negative thoughts in the future, I leave here a link to the fantastic bibliography that supported this research: bit.ly/2jnpNT7. There is an interesting portion of the corpus on racism too.

Emily Kingstad won the prize for best presentation in the conference, and I can easily understand why, being lucky enough to have taken part to her presentation. Her talk on feminist pedagogy in information literacy was very well presented, the aims of her research were clearly exposed and I was impressed by the beautiful words she used to explore this fantastic topic. The main take away from this talk is embedding more feminism in all the lessons I will deliver to my students: sometimes subtly, maybe using a she instead of the usual he when presenting a problem with a generic person, or maybe more guerilla style, with more meaningful and visible actions, like posters or challenging sexist behaviour in class and outside. Briefly, feminist pedagogy in the library practice means being a facilitator for students, opening the practice to different ideas coming from different voices, engaging with all stakeholders, and look for meaningful collaboration with other departments. All this will be happening in my workplace from now on. I am totally captivated.

As we said at the beginning of this post, the EBLIP10 conference presented an abundance of material to think about and gave us the chance to compare our practice and services with those of other institutions, inspiring us to reflect on how our services could be improved, what we could do in a different way and highlighting the importance of stories.