Stopping to Catch our Breath: Putting Our Evidence Synthesis Service on Pause

Abstract

Our evidence synthesis team consists of 5 librarians actively taking on reviews, who are also liaisons to specific user groups. Our expectation is that librarians in our service only take on the development of search strategies for 3 different evidence synthesis projects at one time. Given the high volume of requests and that the 5 librarians were fully at 3 reviews under development each, we had to institute a pause in service of 3 months to give librarians time to catch up and complete search strategies for current reviews. In this lightning talk, I will share how we instituted a pause, how we advertised the pause, and reactions to the 3-month pause in service. Overall, this pause did not help stem the flow of new reviews coming in (3 more requests were received during the pause, with 1 new request per month being typical for our service), but it did help raise morale slightly amongst our librarians who felt that we were being responsive to their needs. 3 months was enough time for many of our librarians to catch up, and all 3 reviews received during the pause were able to be immediately assigned out to a librarian when we resumed service. This method might be a plausible way for library evidence synthesis teams to respond to the needs and workload of their librarians, while still only temporarily saying no to new requestors. One unintended outcome of the 3-month pause is that it gave users requesting a new evidence synthesis project additional time to work out their research questions and draft a protocol. This strengthened the proposals of the reviews we took on after the pause.