Critical librarianship: A health library case study.

Abstract

Critical librarianship is evident across the information landscape and has always been embedded in the profession. At its essence, critical librarianship, and critical theory in general, focuses on both critiquing and changing society as opposed to simply understanding or explaining it. This takes many different forms and guises. In academic libraries it may be supporting critical thinking, information literacy, and lifelong learning skills in students. This can be achieved through activities relating to library instruction, collection development, reference and research queries and scholarly communication (Citation1,Citation2).

A hospital library environment is similar. For collection development, that might entail purchasing resources relevant to care for the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities or multigenerational care. It may also involve specific work on committees by providing critical evaluation of the literature or highlighting inequities through archival collections.

An excellent example within the health library sciences field is Naicker’s Critically Appraising for Antiracism Quality Appraisal Tool. Researchers may not take racial bias into account when assessing a paper’s quality yet racial bias in research impacts a study’s relevancy, validity and reliability (Citation4). Naicker, a fellow librarian, developed a tool which not only alerts a consumer of limitations in published research, giving them an idea of a study’s strength and methodological robustness, but this process also underlines the importance of diversity from the Beginning of the research cycle, and in doing so supports researchers of the future to overcome these limitations.

The example below explores a topic that sprung up unexpectedly. Critical action was needed instead of letting an unwanted change become the norm.