Category Archives: Professional Development Opportunity

New Resources for Library Advocacy by Loida Garcia-Febo

Each librarian is an advocate. Each library worker is an advocate. Library associations like IFLA and ALA, and library schools have developed a myriad of materials, including courses, to help library advocates continue advocating to keep libraries open, funded and equipped. As we know, programs and services provided by libraries are essential to better the education and lifelong learning of the communities they serve at academic, public, school and all types of libraries.

This past year, while I presided the American Library Association, I worked with the incredibly talented ALA staff members and my Presidential Advisory Board to develop new library advocacy resources which I am very happy to share in this post.

A comprehensive website that became a one-stop clearinghouse for all-things Advocacy: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/

Videos to help libraries use the power of storytelling to impact advocacy:

Video #1 – Advocacy 101: Getting Your Library Story in your Local News

Page includes a checklist for reaching out-  http://www.ala.org/advocacy/media

 

Video #2 – Advocacy 101: Inviting Your Elected Leaders to Visit Your Library

Page includes a visit checklist- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/tour

Video #3 is a playlist! – The many reasons why ALA members advocate for libraries #IamALA (Fabulous campaign you can customize for your own library association!) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY6JdvV7ZFZvjSwPO2Wj7MIkS40uKC8E1

Additionally, I would like to share that as a part of the ALA’s 2019 National Library Week celebrated last April, and ALA’s year-round advocacy work, ALA released two new superb tools to help library advocates and libraries across the USA share their story on digital platforms: a Live Stream and Video Storytelling Checklist and a Social Media Advocacy Toolkit! The resources were rolled out in conjunction with the amazing #MyLibraryMyStory initiative, a video and social media effort that aimed to encourage library advocates and users to create and share videos and content about their libraries on social media such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

I hope you can review these resources and adapt them to the needs of the libraries in your city, region and country. I am happy to connect with you about them!

Loida Garcia-Febo

International Library Consultant

Immediate Past President, American Library Association

IFLA Governing Board Member 2013-2017

IFLA CPDWL Member

The CPDWL Coaching Initiative continues!

The CPDWL Coaching Initiative is moving forward. A webinar was offered in the end of May “Enhancing your strengths through coaching”. This free webinar explored the role of coaching and its value for developing library and information professionals for the future. Further information on the webinar is available at: https://www.ifla.org/cpdwl/projects

The next step is a session at the WLIC in Athens. A Drop in Coaching session is offered on Thursday August 29, 08:30 – 10:30 in Banqueting Hall. Session 251 in the WLIC programme.

The session offers career and professional development coaching for the individual and is an initiative from CPDWL in collaboration with the Management & Marketing section.

All WLIC delegates are welcome to join the coaching session.
The set up is a drop-in session where the participants can get coached in areas as Professional development and lifelong learning, Career planning, People management and leadership, Change management, Project management, Marketing as well as Work-life-balance.

The coaching will focus on one individual at a time. Each coaching interaction will last approximately 15-30 minutes. Please note that there can be a waiting time for a coach to be available. There will be a waiting area available in the room.

The focus of the coaching will be to help develop the individual’s career and professional development. The coach helps the individual to move from where one is to where one needs to go and wants to be. The coach will support the coached person to see ways and opportunities to move forward in his/her professional life. The focus will be on supporting the individual to lead herself/himself and for the individual to identify areas in need of development.
Societal trends are placing new demands on the library and information sector. To ensure that library professionals are prepared to adapt to these changes, it is imperative to be ‘learning organizations’ and continuously develop the staff. The IFLA Guidelines for CPD state: “The individual library and information professional is primarily responsible for pursuing ongoing learning that constantly improves knowledge and skills”.

The CPDWL section has during the last years been working with interactive and collaborative methods in order to increase the professional development and competence sharing in the work of the section as well as of IFLA. During former CPDWL satellite conferences, career and professional development coaching has been part of the program. At WLIC 2018 in Kuala Lumpur a coaching pilot test was performed. This was very well received by the delegates, and we are now offering a new coaching possibility during the WLIC in Athens.

The members of the Coaching Initiative working group for the 2019 programme are Catharina Isberg, Almuth Gastinger, Ewa Stenberg and Ulrike Lang from the CPDWL section, and Anya Feltreuter and Cindy Hill from the Management & Marketing section.

/Catharina Isberg

Work hacks – upset those work routines

Nothing is more seductive than (work) routines and the notion of ” that`s the way we’ve always done it”. When we work reliably then we get reliable results – but rarely something that surprises, that is new or leads unexpectedly to completely new findings. Sometimes just small changes help teams to come to new conclusions.

Can only software specialists hack? No, in the meantime, the term “hack” has become generally accepted as an unusual and creative way of solving a problem. In this sense, much can be “hacked” – even the work.

Continue reading →

How to Host a Virtual Poster Session

The Instruction Committee of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Distance Learning Section (DLS) hosted its first virtual poster session April 1st-5th 2019. The committee sent out a call for proposals to a variety of listservs including ILI, DLS, and RUSA in January of 2019 and accepted a total of 38 posters that related to teaching and learning online. Committee members worked together to develop the call for proposals, select the poster platform, advertise the event, and create an evaluation survey for participants and presenters to submit feedback.

The committee investigated several platforms for hosting the event including Canvas, LibGuides, Padlet, Moodle, and Google Sites, but ultimately decided to host the posters on the Distance Learning Section’s own website which is hosted on WordPress. The DLS website was chosen to bring more visibility to the section and because participants could view and comment on posters without creating an account.

The poster presenters were asked to actively monitor their posters during the first week of April and to respond to any comments or questions that were posed. From April 1st-5th there were 19,609 page views, 1,853 visitors (including repeat visitors), and 298 comments (including a few trackbacks). Though the poster presenters are no longer actively monitoring and responding to the comments on their posters, an archive of the event is freely available on the DLS Website at https://acrl.ala.org/DLS/2019-virtual-poster-session/

Thanks to Michelle Keba, Associate Librarian for Reference, Warren Library, Palm Beach Atlantic University and
Jennifer Shimada, Library Director, Relay Graduate School of Education for this blog post.

Leadership lessons from fiction? What we can learn from Game of Thrones

Have you read George R.R. Martin’s series of novels, A Song of Ice and Fire or do you know the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones?

Bruce Craven teaches Leadership through Fiction at the Columbia Business School in New York and he gives some advices:

If you must face a difficult challenge then accept that challenge and face it.

One central character says “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” But she is wrong. Of course there is a middle ground. “It is the realm of thoughtful decision making, with a full appreciation of other people’s values and beliefs. If you decide to play the game of business, learn to understand and leverage your abilities in this middle ground.”

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Leadership-lessons-from-Game-of-Thrones?gko=33bc5&sf210284958=1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones

 

Hamburg Open Online University

In 2015 the Hamburg Senate, the government of the City and the state Hamburg in Germany, founded a digital strategy to bundle up all digital processes and create structures for those. For education, the Hamburg Open Online University (HOOU) stands for this. This cross-university project is funded by the network of the six state-owned Hamburg universities and the government.
In the future, the HOOU wants to enrich and supplement the classical teaching of the Hamburg universities with the possibilities of digital technologies. The learning offers of the HOOU are to be made freely accessible to all interested in the Internet.

The peculiarity of the concept lies in the desire to create a digital space in which students, teachers as well as the interested public can meet to work together on interdisciplinary, cross-university projects with academic aspirations. And it also should be a low-threshold offer for refugees.

Four aspects serve as guiding principles:

  1. Orientation on learners and collaboration
  2. Science
  3. Opening up to new target groups and civil society relevance
  4. Openness /OER

The content is constantly growing and a number of learning courses and webinars are in different languages, for ex. interactive programming courses, topics in law and economics, sonic environments for healing, project management in urban design or the sounds of the Port City Hamburg.

Beside this they offer a lot of materials (eg texts, pictures, videos or links) on a specific topic, such as a specific research question or learning unit.

If the content of HOOU is not interesting for you it might be interesting for your users and customers.

 

Using the IFLA CPD Guidelines as the framework for a workshop in Singapore

On Friday, 29 March 2019, over 50 library and information professionals attended a workshop jointly hosted by the Library Association of Singapore and Singapore Management University. The workshop, entitled Your career: the now, the new, the next: mapping your future professional pathways, aimed to provide mid-career professionals with a forum to reflect on their career journey and to explore strategies for personal growth.

The IFLA Guidelines for Continuing Professional Development: Principles and Best Practices represented the framework for the workshop. These Guidelines highlight the roles that all stakeholders play in ensuring a strong future for library and information services: individual learners, employer, library associations, LIS educators and training providers. Following an environmental scan of initiatives dealing with the need for upskilling in libraries presented by the workshop leader, Gill Hallam*, a facilitated panel discussion allowed the voices of employers, library associations, educators and trainers to be heard.

The panel included Gulcin Cribb, University Librarian at Singapore Management University, Bethany Wilkes, College Librarian with Yale-National University of Singapore Library, Samantha Ang,  President of the Singapore Library Association, and Associate Professor Chris Khoo, an academic with Nanyang Technological University.  The panel members shared their ideas about the importance and value of professional development, arguing that individual librarians needed to align themselves with the strategic directions of the parent organisation.

This set the scene for the interactive table discussions which allowed the participants to think about where they fitted into the rapidly changing workplace, to visualise where they wanted to go in the future, and to identify some practical strategies which would help them get there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: Rajen Munoo, SMU Library

Feedback from participants after the workshop was very positive: they said they felt more confident about taking responsibility for their professional learning to seek out informal PD opportunities like webinars and mentoring, encouraged by their awareness of the intrinsic support from their employers.  The Library Association of Singapore was encouraged to lead the way in offering ongoing PD activities to their members.

*Gill Hallam is currently Co-Chair of the CPDWL Standing Committee