Meet Debra Thornton – CILIP NW sponsored DREaM delegate

Debra Thornton is the CILIP NW sponsored DREaM conference delegate. Here she speaks about her involvement in LIS research projects. She hopes that her work will inspire many librarians to take up research and improve the evidence base for Library and Information Science.

Debra Thornton is Knowledge and Library Services Manager at the Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

She says that in her previous role as a Clinical Librarian she became very aware of the importance of evidence based practice and its application to disciplines other than medicine e.g teaching and librarianship. Since then she has always tried to conduct her professional duties based on evidence of what works well.

In the field of LIS she was often frustrated by the lack of good quality studies. This led her to carrying out evaluation studies on her own. She later became involved in a number of research projects with other Clinical Librarians and realised that ordinary, everyday librarians such as herself can carry out research studies that could help other LIS professionals.

Debra says that she is very pleased to have won the bursary to attend the DREaM conference and looks forward to participating at the event on Monday 9th July.