Impact of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia Library Closure: A Qualitative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Closure of health libraries may have a negative impact on physicians evidence-based practice. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia (CPSBC) made the decision to close their Library in March 2024. This study aims to understand the impact of the CPSBC Library's closure on doctors in BC using interview data. A descriptive qualitative approach will also be used to understand how individuals are affected by the closures. The study objectives are: What were physicians’ experience using the library services provided by the CPSBC Library before the closure? How did the closure impact CPSBC physicians? What library services or resources are still unmet or inaccessible to physicians since the closure of the CPSBC library? What strategies have CPSBC physicians used to help them find evidence-based or credible information since the closure? How has the closure of the CPSBC impacted the practice of physicians? How has this change in access to library services and resources impacted the provision of patient care? How do physicians feel about the level of care they are able to provide with or without access to the library? How has professional development/knowledge mobilization/research been affected by the CPSBC closure? This study will use the methodology of qualitative descriptive design, with an inductive, thematic approach to coding. Qualitative descriptive design is appropriate for this work because the closure of the CPSBC Library provides an opportunity to understand the contextual experiences of the participants and to capture themes and patterns to guide future research on the effect of health library closures. Qualitative research methods provide insightful and varied accounts of the everyday information seeking experience of the participants which can help illuminate barriers and work-arounds to using library services. The themes collected through qualitative research methods have the potential to move toward a deeper understanding of the broader contextual experiences of health care professionals and researchers and health library services. The number of interviews conducted will be dictated by the point of saturation. It is anticipated that this will be 15 - 20 participants. Participants will be invited to an individual interview and provided with the interview question beforehand for accessibility considerations and to allow time to prepare and reflect. Interviews will be based on open-ended prompts in order to elicit the experience of participants, reflecting the primary research questions outlined in this proposal. A dialogue will ensue with the interviewer prompting for more information when needed to elicit
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".