Monthly Archives: April 2019

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

German library conference 2019

The German library conference took place this year in Leipzig. It is the biggest annual librarian`s conference in Europe. More than 260 lectures, workshops and hand-on-labs were presented together with a huge exhibition of hard-, software and services. Under the title “Libraries for change”  4000 librarians from Germany, neighbouring countries and abroad met to discuss a huge variety of topics. Societies are changing and libraries have to follow these dynamics with innovative concepts and lifelong learning staff members.

The last three years ALA was partner of the German library associations. This year the official partnership switched to the Netherlands where the libraries are very active to promote “the library as a third place”.

One of the recurring themes were fake news and the best way to deal with. “Put the focus on the victims and the outcome instead of only looking at the offenders and give them another platform to be famous” a journalist proposed.

More and more frequently, false information is scattered across all communication channels in order to influence public opinion or to discredit other-minded people. Portrait photos with quotes take out of context, which are often distributed via social networks, are just the tip of the iceberg. In their role as information brokers, libraries must counter this and empower more and more people to distinguish fake news from actual news. There were plenty of suggestions for such formats for work on the ground – especially for the youth. And of course the education and strengthening of our own staff is very important not only in this context.

More than 400 presentations are already uploaded online for those who want to recap or had not the chance to participate in Leipzig. Most of the follow-ups are in German but some are in English, too.  And more will be uploaded in the next weeks. At the  BIB Opus publication server you can also find the presentations of the past German and Austrian library conferences, the articles of some German library journals in fulltext and more.