Evidence-Based Practice and Organizational Development in Libraries

This article is written for a Festschrift for F. W. Lancaster, and it summarizes the author’s library school experiences as a student of Professor Lancaster and Professor Herbert Goldhor at the University of Illinois. Both professors instilled in students a strong inclination to use real and appropriate information in evaluating situations, making decisions, delivering information services, and managing libraries. The author suggests that this Lancaster-Goldhor approach to information, and to data-driven decision making, anticipated the current movement toward evidence-based practice (EBP) in libraries. He suggests that libraries embrace the premises, philosophy, values, and practices of organizational development (OD) as an overarching discipline that facilitates EBP in the library culture, and ultimately leads to healthier and more effective organizations. This article complements a 2004 Library Trends article on OD, and numerous recent publications on OD and related topics are cited. Introduction The title of the Festschrift in which this article appears is “The Evaluation and Transformation of Information Systems: Essays in Honor of the Legacy of F. W. Lancaster” (Haricombe and Russell, 2008). That title reflects the influence his work has had on how information systems are evaluated and improved over time. The word “transformation” refers to the tremendous change in the last forty years in the capability of those systems to help society expand and maintain its control over an ever-growing body of intellectual content and bibliographic information. Lancaster is one Evidence-Based Practice and Organizational Development in Libraries