21st Century Skills for Librarians

A blog posting by Meredith Farkas, from a technology point of view. Includes basic technology skills/attitudes and higher level competencies, such as project management. This is the stuff she wishes someone had emphasized when she was in library school!

Summarizes and links to "Faculty Survey 2009: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies."

So how do you take these Digital Native realities and build a set of strategies that support your organization's digital initiatives, especially when technology is quickly and constantly shifting? More information about our users and their expectations--and as a result, the skills we will need in order to make these new tools and experiences a reality.

"build your strategies to support the core values of your users, not to support the advancement of technology. " - Yes, but the article just showed how these values were shaped by technology, noting how the digital generation is different from older generations because of technology.

I think the "engagement, enrichment, and empowerment" ideas are really important for us and our future skill sets. We don't know how to do any of these really well, imo, (but especially the enrichment part) and we need to learn more techniques and strategies for interacting with our users in the spaces they prefer. Whether these user needs are the result of nature or nurture, we are going to have to pay attention to them if we want to continue to be of value.

Excerpt: "Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Wideners collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Googles massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform."

If you are rushed for time and can't read all the articles, be sure to read this one.

Quick read with good ideas about how to help today's college students.

In 2008, WebJunction received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a set of competencies for those managing public access computing in their libraries. As a follow-up to this work, we developed a full Competencies Index for the Library Field, which outlines the full spectrum of library practice. The Index was published in 2009, and since July 2009, we've been using this index to help us identify the topics library staff most need to develop new skills or support around. WebJunction's Competencies for Libraries outlines recent research we've completed in this area.

Good site to be aware of. Thanks!

Broader than I expected with opportunities for law and museum librarians.

As research library leaders confront turbulent times, they sorely need new tools to facilitate thinking about the future of the institution and to foster dialogue within the community. ARL's new project seeks to envision library futures and will engage the Association's member community in looking decades out at the situations that will confront research libraries. At the heart of this work will be the creation of a set of future scenarios and a toolkit to facilitate research library leaders in their planning and decision making.

It will be interesting to see in twenty years if any of the scenarios pan out. Would someone doing scenarios twenty years ago have predicted just how digital today's libraries are?

These are my slides from the panel I did at TLA with Stephen Abram and John Blyberg. You know, if you look at these slides, you will find out everything I am secretly planning! :-)

Interesting discussion of job description for new position at Karen Schneider's library. You can see the the 21st century librarian is going to have to know a lot about a lot in order to be able to function and to be successful...

With so many hats and more in the making, at least librarians won't be bored!

In the 21st century, ARL libraries are increasingly exploring and adopting a range of new roles in serving research institutions, researchers, scholars, and students, making the time ripe for ARL to organize a new report cluster focusing on key new roles. The series will identify and delineate emerging roles and present research on early experiences among member libraries in developing the roles and delivering services.

Reiterates findings we've discussed such as a risk-tolerant culture.

In his 12 strategies to make libraries "fit" Bell, among other things, talks about smart innovation and gives examples of companies who weren't so smart.

Since we've written our report, we may not be sharing new articles. I thought you all would be interested in this one anyway.

Since the report isn't totally completed (i.e. I haven't finished my part), I have been fretting about whether/what we should do to update it. A lot has come out since we last met. Do others have thoughts? My mother is in hospice as of Wed. night and I am in and out right now. Melinda

from John

Link shared by group organizing activities for the library goal, Be a culture of innovation.

Eric's current comments about his "old" posting: In a slightly dated LITA-hosted blog posting [1] I addressed this question, and below are snippets from my reply: 1) XML - XML is a sort of modern-day alchemy. 2) Relational databases - Libraries love lists. 3) Indexing - Believe it or not, databases suck as facilitating search, especially considering today's user expectations regarding relevance ranking. 4) Web serving - Increasingly people expect to acquire the information the require for learning, teaching, and research through a Web browser. 5) Programming/scripting - Finally, you will want to "glue" all of the above technologies together into a coherent whole. Please do not be overwhelmed. All of these things can be learned and practiced on your desktop or home computer. They lend themselves better to server-class operating systems such a Unix/Linux, but learning about these operating systems is challenging in itself and not readily applicable to librarianship. All you need is the ability to read books, the desire to learn, and the time to do it.

Did you all see The Chronicle Review's question to scholars and their answers about what will be the defining idea of the next decade? From the titles of their responses it looks like a wide range of ideas.

from John