Approaching librarianship from the data: using bibliomining for evidence‐based librarianship

The purpose of this work is to present an alternative way of considering evidence‐based librarianship (EBL) through an examination of the data that makes up studies used for EBL.

This piece starts with the standard evidence‐based librarianship definition and deconstructs it down to the level of the individual user, and that data is considered in a different context.

The bibliomining process, or the combination of data warehousing, data mining, and bibliometrics, is used as a framework to build a different path to EBL. Bibliomining‐based evidence‐based librarianship is not appropriate for all topics; however, when the artifacts of library use can be gathered and explored, this method can provide a different path to reach the goals of EBL.

As the quantity of studies needed for traditional EBL are not currently available, this alternate method provides a way to achieve the goals of EBL through data already in the library systems.