2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background
The authors of this paper are managers who oversee evidence synthesis services in science and engineering libraries. This paper will synthesize strategies for effectively offering these services as shared in the library, information studies, and STEM education literature. Given that these services are time intensive to offer and require significant training, our goal is to identify best practices for managing these services while optimizing resource allocation.

Purpose
Our intention with this study is to fully understand the options for supporting evidence synthesis requests that have been implemented by other libraries. We want to surface issues and considerations that need to be addressed when designing locally customized services informed by expertise, staffing capacity, and other contexts. What professional development is needed to train employees and in what roles? Is there customized software or licenses required for library employees to do this work? How can library policies and practices balance the work time of library employees with the needs of university researchers. Based on our experience as managers of professional librarians engaged in evidence synthesis work, we hypothesize that the main concerns are workload, training, and managing expectations of library users. Due to the costs and difficulty in licensing certain evidence synthesis software, it is likely we will surface challenges librarians face in the use of these software platforms and services.

Scope
This study will not employ the methods of evidence synthesis, but will cast a wide net and strive to be comprehensive in discovering the literature about designing and supporting library services to support evidence synthesis for STEM researchers. We will search for literature in general literature databases (Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions), the engineering literature (Web of Science, Compendex), and the library literature (Library Literature and Information Science Full Text, Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts). We have decided not to include a review of service examples presented on websites or research guides, since it would require inference of policies or staffing decisions based on the presented services.

Results
There is not a large collection of literature published about developing and supporting evidence synthesis services in libraries. We anticipate that the solutions presented are heavily influenced by local circumstances (staffing, demand), while there are some common challenges to all library service considerations. Anticipated themes include the need for software not typically part of library services (e.g. Covidence), providing training for librarians and balancing workload demands, and navigating the interface and taxonomy differences between different databases and fields of expertise.

Conclusions
The authors anticipate sharing best practices and diverse models for delivering evidence synthesis services, emphasizing the importance of setting clear expectations for both staff and users. Additionally, the authors anticipate sharing how workflows and services developed outside of engineering libraries, primarily in medical libraries, can be effectively integrated into existing engineering library services.