Mapping and connecting parliamentary research services around the world

Description

Research evidence is a vital resource for parliaments as they scrutinise, debate and approve policies and legislation. Although parliamentary libraries are found around the world, the research services that they and other parliamentary offices provide are under-appreciated and poorly understood. Authors have drawn clear distinctions between on-demand legislative research services (often provided by libraries) and in-depth, proactive science and technology advice (Tyler & Akerlof, 2019). This has led to suggestions that around 90% of legislatures lack effective science advice mechanisms since in-depth, long-range advice is beyond the capacity of on-demand services and demands skills of distillation and impartiality (Tyler & Akerlof, 2019). The advice mechanisms that are recognised and valued by these and other authors are found in northern European democracies.
We have created a different picture of this landscape. Through a Parliamentary Academic Fellowship with the UK’s Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology we have mapped out the services helping parliaments across the world to access and harness research evidence. Many of these are housed in parliamentary libraries and many are much more sophisticated than authors have presumed. Clearly there are also a large number outside northern Europe.
In our presentation we will share our online map showing the services we found during our project. We will explain what we have included on the map and why and will invite suggestions of other services we may have missed. We will also explain how we hope that people might use the map and invite ideas about how it could be made more useful. We hope that sharing our map will raise awareness of the range of research services across the world and enable them to better connect with and learn from one another.

Period	18 Aug 2023 → 19 Aug 2023
Event title	38th Pre-Conference of the Library and Research Services for Parliaments Section of IFLA
Event type	Conference
Location	The Hague, NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International