Introduction

This issue of Library Trends, on the theme of Research Into Practice, has been designed with two aims in mind. Published in 2013, it marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Information School (iSchool) at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom by presenting a selection of papers that demonstrate the creativity and variety of research undertaken in the field of librarianship and share a unifying concern to make links, as well as establish meaningful connections, between research and practice. The issue is dedicated to Bob Usherwood, now an emeritus professor in the school, whose work and legacy at Sheffield are distinguished by an exemplary commitment to putting research into practice, and it is especially pleasing for us to be able offer this tribute to Bob in the year when he is due to celebrate his seventieth birthday. We also believe that an issue on this theme is timely and important for our profession. There has been a strong drive lately to promote evidence-based practice in library and information work and to develop a research culture in the practitioner community, exemplified in the United Kingdom by the DREaM project, amid continuing concerns about the disconnect between the research and practitioner communities (Hall, 2011a, 2011b).

The Sheffield iSchool was founded as the Postgraduate School of Librarianship in 1963. It was the second university-level school of its kind in the United Kingdom and the first to switch from the postgraduate diploma to a master’s degree, the master’s degree in librarianship (MA Librarianship), as a basic qualification for the library profession (the first library school in the United Kingdom was established at University College London in 1919, and it was not until after World War II that other schools appeared, many of them located in technical colleges and colleges of commerce) (Bramley, 1981). In 1967, an additional program, which offered the MSc in Information Studies, was introduced and the school’s name changed to the Postgraduate School of Librarianship and Information Science. Over the next forty years, the school continued to grow, to develop and expand its areas of expertise, and to introduce new programs, including bachelor’s and master’s degrees in information management and a master’s in information systems, in addition to specialized master’s degrees in chemoinformatics, health informatics, information systems management, multilingual information management, and digital library management, while the master’s in librarianship continued as its flagship program.

Throughout its history, professional education at the iSchool has been research led, incorporating research from Sheffield and elsewhere into the teaching of faculty and the learning of students. The school was a pioneer in library and information science (LIS) research in the United Kingdom, winning its first research grant (in the area of information retrieval) within months of opening and subsequently developing a very strong doctoral program, which now attracts candidates from all parts of the world. Sheffield has consistently achieved the top ranking in the United Kingdom for LIS research in every national research assessment exercise since the process was introduced more than twenty years ago. Research at the school can be broadly grouped into two main areas: library and information management, covering the use and management of information in a range of organizational contexts, and computational informatics, covering the computational tools required to support information systems of various sorts. In 2009, Sheffield became the first U.K. school to join the international iSchools group and formally adopted the name Information School in 2010.

Bob Usherwood joined the school as a lecturer in librarianship in 1976, after a distinguished career in public libraries, which included the position of chief librarian for a large library authority in London. After promotions at Sheffield to senior lecturer and then reader, he was appointed as a full professor of librarianship in 1998. Over a period of nearly thirty years in the school, Usherwood led the development and expansion of its teaching, research, and outreach in public librarianship, as well as doing innovative and seminal work of wider applicability in the areas of quality management, workforce planning, and leadership development. He deliberately set out to...