Research to support the development of a sector-wide research portal

Client:

CILIP (The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals)

The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) are the independent voice that represent and champion all information professionals.  In 2016 CILIP committed to adopting an evidence based approach to policy making and its other activities as part of the Action Plan 2016-2020. This included a plan to develop a sector-wide evidence base or research portal for the information profession as a long-term objective.  As part of the plan CILIP commissioned Evidence Base and Manchester Metropolitan University to scope this vision and research into the needs of the information profession and how far they might be addressed through the development of an evidence-base/research portal. The project was conducted over a period of four months.

Initial desk research was undertaken to identify and analyse some of the portals and evidence bases that currently exist, in total, 48 portals were reviewed.  A short online survey was produced and sent to key stakeholders and interviews were conducted with a selection of stakeholders to gauge the potential demand for an evidence base/research portal and to identify early on possible users of the portal and key features that could potentially be implemented.

Links to project outputs

The conclusions reached through this preliminary research indicate that an evidence base portal may well be of value to the information sector and suggestions of some essential features for an evidence portal proposed model including case studies, data sets and open access search engines have been identified.  The report ‘Research to Support the Development of a Sector-wide Research Portal/evidence-base’ can be found at the link below:

View the CILIP research portal/evidence base 2018 report

Benefits

Desk research, stakeholder surveys and interviews completed by Evidence Base resulted in the accumulation of a variety of views and feedback shaping the demand and requirement for an evidence base/research portal.