Defining Liaison-Based Evidence Synthesis Services at a Non-Health Science Library

Abstract

As evidence synthesis becomes increasingly common across disciplines, academic libraries outside of the health sciences need to grow to support this type of research. In this lightning talk, we will share our initial steps to define evidence synthesis service and create a community of practice at Tufts University’s Tisch Library in its School of Arts, Sciences, & Engineering. While other libraries at Tufts, including its health science and veterinary libraries, have robust support for evidence synthesis, support at Tisch Library was not defined and varied widely based on librarian expertise. Our librarians’ experience with evidence synthesis ranged from no experience, to formal training and experience publishing evidence synthesis projects. After assessing interest among librarians in defining our services, we spoke with librarians at other Tufts libraries and external institutions, wrote language to share publicly about our services, and created internal documentation for librarians. Most importantly, we formed communication channels among library staff for questions and skill-sharing around evidence synthesis. We will also discuss our planned next steps in advertising our evidence synthesis services and growing our internal expertise.