Should We Value Knowledge and Expertise? (editorial)

As I write this editorial, I am on an airplane, reflecting on the EBLIP6 conference, held June 27-30, 2011 in Salford, U.K. In my personal opinion, the conference was a great success. There were a wide variety of concurrent paper sessions from an international group of delegates, thought provoking keynotes, and just the right amount of social activity, including the main conference dinner at the Manchester United Football Club! This journal will have a Feature section in our next issue (December) that highlights the conference, including keynote presentations, some of the papers that were presented, and commentaries from attendees about the conference itself. So for now, I’ll just offer my warmest congratulations to the organizers. As I left Salford and tried to reflect on what I had learned and discussed with others, there were many things that came to mind. Immediate things that stood out for me had to do with impact, reflection, and the complexity of decision making. The theme of EBLIP6 was “Valuing Knowledge and Expertise”. This is a somewhat controversial theme for an evidence based practice conference, where research evidence and its implementation are the focus, and expert opinion is not generally held in high regard. None of the keynote speakers’ presentations spoke directly to the theme, however several paper presentations did include some reference to the importance of professional knowledge. Expertise is a loaded word, filled with notions of snobbery and over-confidence, even close-mindedness. If anything, those involved with EBLIP remove themselves as far from the notion of “expert” as they can. But if we consider an expert to be someone who has built up a significant amount of professional knowledge (both through experience and research) on a topic, then the EBLIP movement should not simply dismiss this notion of “expert”. Perhaps, we more appropriately should consider expert voices (knowledgeable, reasonable, experienced voices) as ones that we need to listen to as another source of evidence within our profession. Reflecting on this made me realise that in my own professional approach, I often seek out different experts depending upon the questions I am trying to answer. When I was a newer librarian, my more senior colleagues were the experts I learned from and they gave me guidance at that point in my career. Now, when starting new projects, I may consult experts from other institutions to help me by passing on their knowledge of something that is new to me; and I, in turn, do the same for other librarians. That consultation is a starting