ALA's Core Competencies of Librarianship
http://www.ala.org/ala/educationcareers/careers/corecomp/corecompetences/finalcorecompstat09.pdf
Two areas I felt should be of utmost priority for today's librarians were the section "Continuing Education & Lifelong Learning" and a corollary under the section "Administration & Management" that reads as follows: "The concepts behind, and methods for, developing partnerships, collaborations, networks, and other structures with all stakeholders and within communities served."
I firmly believe the librarians should attend conferences, seminars, workshops, etc to continue their professional education and broaden the depth of their knowledge in this field. Too often, I have encountered public librarians who do not know how to access a particular website, search engine, or the like on the computer or that have never heard of social media resources. These are a few of the latest advances in information resources that current librarians, some who have been in the field for decades, are simply unprepared to access or lack the know-how to do so. Public librarians must at least keep up with technological advances and those generations who know of them. Educators in the schools have been coming to terms with this fact in the last decade and slowly, schools are catching up. Librarians (even those outside of schools) are also, in a way, educators and teachers. We must keep up with our students and ideally, be one step ahead in anticipating their needs and informational wants.
In terms of collaborating with communities, I do not think this competency can be stressed enough for librarians. From a purely financial standpoint, the community is a large source of the budget for a library. If a community feels that its library is going above and beyond in meeting the community's needs, that community might be more likely to vote yes on a millage increase to keep the library solvent. If you constantly are meeting with community leaders and interacting with the community, especially in the area of outreach, your library will be considerably aware of the community's information needs and, hopefully, the best way to meet them.If you develop partnerships with other members of the community, say a local bookstore where you start a used book exchange or something equally beneficial , you can increase the resources of your library at little cost. Collaborating with other libraries, beyond the traditionally thought of ILL system, will also increase the library's resources and boost the knowledge of your librarians who interact with other librarians across the state, country, or even globe. The constant exchange of ideas, innovations, and resources will benefit both partners in such a collaboration.
Overall the core competencies set out by the ALA for librarianship seem rather ambiguous and conceptual. I would have liked to see concrete examples of each statement of a necessary competency. I found it interesting that many of the SI (LIS) classes seem to revolve around a particular clump of competencies. For example, a librarian must be competent in "the systems of cataloging, metadata, indexing and classification standards and methods used to organize recorded knowledge and information." SI offers a class on cataloging that I imagine teaches us just that. There is also a reference to collection management, which SI also offers a specific class on.
The main question I had while reviewing this list was in regards to the very first competency, which reminds librarians to be competent in the "ethics, values...of the library...profession." To discover said ethics and values I searched the ALA website and found myself on a goose chase to nail down exactly what it was I am supposed to value and keep sacred as a librarian. I'm still wading through said materials:
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/statementspols/corevaluesstatement/corevalues.cfm
No comments:
Post a Comment