ICML 9

9º World Congress on Health Information and Libraries

Salvador, Bahia - Brazil, September, 20 to 23 - 2005

BVS4

4th Regional Coordination Meeting of the VHL

September, 19 to 20 - 2005

Evidence-based Librarianship: an introduction

Participants:

Evidence-based Librarianship: an introduction

Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) is a practice which helps both Healthcare professionals and patients to make decisions involving the least level of uncertainty possible based on relevant, known evidence. Likewise, Evidence-based Librarianship (EBL) is intended to make Information professionals capable of using methodological tools adequate to conduct research, with the purpose of achieving quality, evidence and relevant results which will serve as a basis for decision-making in the management of Information Units. The aim of this article is to explore the issues that those two practices involve, by focusing on the contributions for the professionals working with information in the Healthcare field. The review of the existing literature about the topics mentioned (EBM and EBL) has been able to contribute to the present considerations as well as to acquaint the Brazilian Library Community with the main schools currently working with EBL (United States, England and Canada), once in Brazil the number of contributions in this area is rather low. The EBM employs methods which make the information they use in their practice clearer; therefore, after analyzing these methods, we believe the considerations stated here will contribute to the standardization and improvement of new technical and scientific productions in Librarianship, so that the information user is able access it and use it whenever a decision-making is needed.