Reflecting on Librarians’ Needs: Renewing a Systematic Review Service

Background: As demand for librarian expertise in systematic reviews has grown, Health Sciences Libraries have stepped up, developing special services to support researchers. The reference unit at UAB's Lister Hill Library launched their service in 2016 and more recently began to question whether this service was operating efficiently for users and librarians. Rather than focus on what systematic review service users want, we chose to first consider what the librarians running the service need. With this objective in mind we will conduct a needs assessment to identify needs of our librarian stakeholders and to reimagine our systematic review service.

Description: The purpose of a needs assessment is to identify gaps between the current state and the ideal scenario. In the pre-assessment phase, scope will be determined and existing data identified to determine what is already known. In the assessment phase, surveys will be distributed to UAB health sciences reference and liaison librarians to identify gaps in how the service operates. Finally, in the post-assessment phase, the identified needs will be reviewed for common themes which will then be scored by two librarians to identify the gaps which need attention first. Using the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) model, we will conduct a short quality improvement cycle and review the results before making changes and proceeding with a second PDSA cycle. This process will be repeated with incremental improvements made in each PDSA cycle until the librarian users are satisfied with the outcomes.

Conclusion: Survey data will be gathered from survey responses in order to identify commonly expressed needs which will then be scored based on factors like severity, feasibility, cost factors, and importance. Based on the results of this process, an intervention will be identified to improve the systematic review service and will be implemented and measured using the PDSA model. The success of the new interventions will be measured based on factors appropriate to the intervention but could include number of requests, number of completed reviews, number of librarian co-authored publications, training sessions for current staff, or competency measures for staff.