Librarian Instruction of Methods for Evidence Synthesis: A Digital Sociomaterial Ethnographic Study

Abstract

Academic health librarians work in interdisciplinary landscapes where health professions education, health and biomedical research methods, digital information, and increasingly, online instruction, intersect. These fields come together in the online teaching practices of health librarians when supporting students to develop systematic search strategies for evidence synthesis (ES) research, such as systematic or scoping reviews. While librarians leverage their expertise through teaching ES methods to help build students’ capacity for producing and understanding ES research, they must balance that work against other professional responsibilities. Librarians contribute to the academic research environment while simultaneously attending to rapidly changing technological and methodological developments, creating sustainability challenges. Student and institutional expectations for online and accessible learning further compound workload issues. Metrics and reporting regarding instruction and research support in academic libraries fall short of accounting for the amount and nature of labour and expertise required to teach evidence synthesis methods through online pedagogies. To understand the nature of librarians’ work when providing online support for students’ ES research, I aimed to unpack the factors that complicate teaching practices. Using digitally-mediated ethnographic methods combined with sociomateriality and practice theories, I studied the online teaching practices of Canadian health librarians. I collected qualitative data through two focus groups, eight observations of online research consultations, and five interviews as well as through material such as such as video tutorials, online library guides, and the digital tools used for evidence syntheses. Analysis involved tracing actions and disruptions to build relational accountings of the human and non-human contributors to online teaching practices. This research used an emic approach informed by my work as an academic health librarian leading evidence synthesis support. In response to methodological expectations and learners’ demonstrated abilities, librarians calibrated their teaching to balance technical and conceptual learning objectives related to the interconnected steps of ES methods. Librarians taught searching, question formulation, and more through the affordances of various technologies, both to deliver the training and in conducting steps of the review. In doing so, librarians’ identities and areas of expertise around teaching, searching, information management, technology proficiency, and research methods came together in complex and situated ways with the particular technological and organizational materialities of online teaching in health professions education. This research contributed a rich understanding of the multiple types of expertise mediated through the social and material elements of academic health librarians’ online teaching practices regarding ES methods. By considering the dynamic relationships between and amongst these factors, I have made visible the less recognized labour and materiality of these teaching practices. The acknowledgement of social and material contributors to online teaching of ES methods can inform planning capacity building initiatives for librarians and in developing levels of support for students, depending on available resources along with individual and organizational expectations.