Tag Archives: Learning

Meet Our New CPDWL Standing Committee Members

We are thrilled to introduce you to the new members of the Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning (CPDWL) Standing Committee. Each member brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, and commitment to lifelong learning in the library profession.

Helen Chan

Helen Chan, the current Chair of the Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning (CPDWL), is an accomplished academic and professional in the library and information science sector. Prior to her current role, she chaired the IFLA Professional Division Committee of Division F and the Action Plan Review Committee, which introduced the widely used ‘Infinity’ platform within IFLA at WLIC 2023. Helen’s strong academic background, including over a decade teaching the Master of Science in Library and Information Management (MsLIM) program at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), enriches her role in CPDWL. Her passion for accessible information led to the creation of a new course for Bachelor of Science in Information Management (BsIM) students at HKU. Beyond academia, Helen supports teacher-librarian training in Hong Kong and participates actively in local non-profit work, holding directorship roles in an educational fund and a local secondary school board.

Joan Weeks

Joan Weeks is the Head of the Near East Section and Turkish Specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division (AMED) at the Library of Congress where she supervises a staff of seven, including Arab, Persian and Armenian specialists with responsibility to acquire, process, and serve the Near East Collections. Prior to this, she was a Sr. Instruction Librarian at the Library of Congress where she designed and taught courses on the Library computer systems to staff. Joan is an elected member-at-large of the American Library Association (ALA) Council, and chairs the Near East and Southeast Asian Committee of the International Relations Committee of ALA. In IFLA, she was the Information Coordinator for the Section on Education and Training (SET), promoting programs such as the webinar series for LIS students. She has a strong interest in library professional development instruction, making her a valuable addition to the CPDWL as the newly appointed Information Coordinator.

Julia Gelfand

Julia Gelfand, a staunch advocate for global communication and cooperation, has been a vibrant part of the ALA’s IRRT Roundtable throughout her career. Julia’s international experience, from Europe and Asia to the Middle East and Africa, has enriched her work with IFLA for over 30 years. She’s been a pivotal part of the Science & Technology Section, the Acquisitions & Collection Development Section, and has contributed to numerous engaging programs. Now joining the professional development section, Julia looks forward to addressing the vast changes in libraries and librarianship, from technology to open movements, in innovative ways.

Tina Yang

Having worked in the library and information industry across China, Australia, and Hong Kong for nearly three decades, Tina Yang now serves as the Associate Librarian at the University of Hong Kong Libraries. In her role, Tina leads a dynamic team in providing diverse information, learning, and research services. Tina has witnessed the transformative power of technology in libraries and emphasizes the importance of mindset and capabilities in embracing this digital shift. As a library manager, Tina values continuing education and is excited to join CPDWL, where she can collaborate with passionate professionals in fostering lifelong learning in the library profession. Tina has also served in various roles within the IFLA Regional Standing Committee of Asia and Oceania.

Jorun Systad

Jorun Systad, Library Director in Sunnfjord municipality, Norway, brings her experience from IFLA’s Libraries for Children and Young Adults section to her current role. She’s particularly interested in enhancing public library services for smaller municipalities, focusing on collaboration with local organizations. Jorun has previously worked as a reading-motivator for “Foreningen!Les” and is an active member in the Norwegian Library Association and National Library’ strategic committee for 2020-2023. Her work emphasizes the need for libraries to facilitate ongoing staff development and workplace training.

Svetlana Gorokhova

Svetlana Gorokhova, an active participant in IFLA since 1994, firmly believes in the importance of continuous learning within the library community. She is excited to join the CPDWL in providing a seamless space for professional development across all sectors of the library community.

Anne Reddacliff

Anne Reddacliff began her rewarding library career in 2001 as a volunteer. Today, she contributes to the Australian Library and Information Association’s (ALIA) Rainbow and Sustainable Libraries groups, remaining connected and inspired. With a love for writing and meeting new people, Anne is excited to bring her skills to IFLA CPDWL, expanding her influence internationally. She eagerly anticipates making new connections and contributing to the profession on a global scale.

Mingyan Li

Mingyan Li serves as the Metadata Librarian and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. With over 15 years of diverse library experience, she specializes in metadata workflows. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Bradley University, Mingyan is dedicated to advancing metadata management through innovation and accessibility.

Susan Cherono

Susan Cherono, a Librarian at the United States International University-Africa, brings over 14 years of experience in the field of Librarianship to CPDWL. With her passion for innovation and learning, she looks forward to contributing to CPDWL meetings and trainings.

Florian Forestier

Florian Forestier is in charge of social innovation and diversity politics at the French National Library and is also the project manager for the creation of the research center. He is passionate about training and development of staff skills, particularly regarding preventing discrimination and changing managerial attitudes.

Simona Marilena Bursasiu

Simona Marilena Bursasiu is a librarian at the Politehnica University of Timișoara, Romania, and an associate lecturer in the field of library and information sciences. As a former president of the Education and Training section of the Romanian Library Association, she is committed to providing online training for librarians around the world through CPDWL.

We welcome a group of dedicated professionals to the Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning (CPDWL) Standing Committee. Each individual brings a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and a commitment to ongoing professional development within the library and information sector. We eagerly anticipate the valuable contributions and fresh insights they will undoubtedly bring in the coming years.

For those interested in learning more about our new members, stay tuned for the upcoming issues of the CPDWL Newsletter. We will be featuring self-introductions from different standing committee members, offering you an in-depth look at their professional journeys, their passions within the field, and the unique perspectives that they bring to our committee.

Watch out for these enlightening features, and please join us once again in extending a warm welcome to our new members of the CPDWL!

Stay tuned and connected with CPDWL!

Librarians in the borderland between professionalism and amateurism

I know – the title may provoke, but by the end of this text, it will hopefully seem comprehensible and justified.

As senior lecturer at a Swedish university offering educational programs in Library and information science (LIS), I sometimes get questions and comments about the training of future librarians. Often it is about what aspiring librarians should know and how this is best taught. It is striking how engaging the issue of librarians’ competence is – the various opinions come from widely different quarters. Sometimes librarians’ work is even proposed as the answer to major societal challenges such as reawakening young people’s lust to read and strengthening citizens’ digital skills.

In addition to the outside world’s expectations of the profession, there is an internal tendency to problematize the professional role and competence. That debate has recurred over decades in trade press, mailing lists and social media. In parallel, research is conducted with the aim of understanding, challenging, equipping and ideally inspiring the profession, and the production of Bachelor and Master theses at our universities testifies to the interest in profession-related topics among students. Their small-scale research contributions are quick-footed and likely to delve into the field’s hottest questions.

Debate and recurring discussions are sometimes interpreted as the profession facing a crisis. For my own part, however, I am both optimistic and incurably curious (the researcher’s occupational injury?). I see vivid discussion as an expression of the importance of libraries for the country’s inhabitants, and internal debate as a sign of vitality. Few professions show such spark! The need for discussion can be linked to the history of the profession; the professionalization process of the past century, amalgamated professional organizations, academisation of training and the establishment of the LIS discipline. Today the profession is powerfully organized, but at the same time it spans disparate activities.

As a natural reaction to societal developments, and perhaps as a backlash for the unifying professional project, new competences are called for in libraries, and more specialized training.

Another important aspect of the position of librarianship today, is its quality as a welfare profession; one of the female-intensive occupations that have thrived within the Nordic welfare hub. Ambivalence towards the profession’s theoretical basis is typical, and compared to classic professions, the welfare professions are less hierarchical, more collaborative and highly focused on the clients. I know from experience, that responsiveness to users’ needs and interests is a shining beacon for aspiring and active librarians, regardless of library type.

Surely that sounds nice? But every medal has its flip side. The emphasis on responsiveness, commitment, and (often) idealism, can make librarians stretch far in their compliance. Always being prepared to tone down competitive thinking and professional pretensions out of consideration for the interests of others, is an attitude that risks backfiring. For an illustration of this dilemma of a welfare profession, we may turn to the children’s librarians – a group that was early associated with selfless work of the “vocational type”. We’d like to think that image faded decades ago, but my research into the competence of children’s librarians was an eye-opener.

The participants in my study said they appreciated the rich opportunities for competence development as well as their chance to influence its content. But several librarians also described dissatisfaction with the overly free choices and the perceived lack of managerial steering of the knowledge-developing activities. Rather than seeing the collective competence as a strategic resource for the workplace, competence development was often treated as an encouraging ‘salary benefit’. Several managers also hesitated in connection with my interview question concerning what incentives they saw for children’s librarians’ competence development. Their answers were that the librarians’ heartfelt meetings with the users – in this case children who love to read – were to be regarded as both a driving force and a reward.

Get me right – trusting relationships and personal appreciation are worth their weight in gold in everyday work, but should we really, in 2022, regard professional work as its own reward? Such an approach, with the logic of the old “vocation” just below the surface, undeniably brings to mind non-profit and amateur work.

There is no room here for the follow-up questions that need to be asked. I end by stating that those concerned with how the librarian profession can be strengthened for the future, should pay attention to where the boundaries are drawn between professional and personal commitment. As a representative of research and higher education, I want to promote a reflective professional practice, where sensitivity to the outside world is complemented by research-oriented and proactive working methods; an ambition that probably applies to most universities offering LIS education around the globe.

What do you think – is there reason to push the discussion about the prerequisites and the future of librarianship one step further? I think so.

Jenny Lindberg
Lecturer at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden

Note: This article has previously been published in Swedish at http://www.noll27.se

The study on children’s librarians mentioned in the blog entry is accessible (in Swedish): https://regionbiblioteket.se/publicerat/barnbibliotekariers-kompetens/

35 day of City Expo – Management Skills and Learning Opportunities

How do you manage during a 35 day long city fair which is the result of a 3 year long innovation journey? And what skills do you need to have in order to manage this?

In a previous blog post, Tina Haglund has described the H22 City Expo of Helsingborg Sweden. https://blogs.ifla.org/cpdwl/2022/06/14/h22-city-expo-helsingborg-sweden/

In this blog post I follow up on this and reflect on the management skills needed and the learning opportunities the City Expo gave.

During the past years, all departments and employees of in the city of Helsingborg have had the opportunity to explore and apply for funding to test new ideas and innovations. The public library of Helsingborg has for example been working with co-creating together with citizens to find out the needs and ideas in a new (and rebuilt) library in 2026 https://innovation.helsingborg.se/en/initiative/development-and-rebuilding-of-the-city-library/. Also the library has a project collaborating with the University of Lund, on “The sustainable/resilient workplace” https://innovation.helsingborg.se/en/initiative/sustainable-workplace-a-collaboration-and-research-project/. Digidel 2.0, exploring how to develop the digital competence center of the library is another example of the work https://innovation.helsingborg.se/en/initiative/digidel-2-0/. And many other innovations and development initiatives have been put in place.

The results of the innovation work so far was presented during various talks and presentations during the 35 days. This meant that at the same time as keeping business running as usual, the library staff also were involved in many different activities. At the same time employees could work as volunteers during the H22.

Of course this affected both the employeeship as well as leadership and management skills. All managers of the city of Helsingborg have, during the last three years, gone through a management skill program called “Samspel Helsingborg” (= interplay/interaction Helsingborg). This program has given us the skills needed in moving from New Public Management (NPM) into a Trust Based Management model and has been key to the success of the innovative movement.

The Trust Based Management model is something which have been worked on at the national level through a research based work “The Swedish Delegation of Trust”. The guiding principles in Trust Based Management is according to The Swedish Delegation of Trust:

Focus on the Citizen – their experience and knowledge, understand what is needed
Comprehensive/holistic view – everyone take responsibility for the whole
Space for action – delegate powers and mandates, welcome co-decisions
Support – closely as part of the core business (rather than central)
Knowledge – reward continuous learning
Openness – share information, welcome dissent and respect criticism

My reflections on some management skills that were of importance before, during and after this period of innovation and City Expo are:

Involvement in strategy and business plan – involve all staff in the strategical planning as well as the operational planning of the library business. Make real use of all the knowledge within the organization and ensure that everyone knows where we are heading. Follow up together with the staff, so that everyone see how the work proceeds.
A culture of participation – ensure to build a culture where both staff and users gets involved and participate in the development work.
Trust – really manage by trust and let go of control. Let the employees use their skills and solve different situations using their full potential and experience. Keep the written routines and rules to an absolute minimum as it is impossible to foresee what will happen and there is a risk that every situation makes you write a new routine instead of focusing on doing the job and solving the situation.
Brave – be brave and have the courage to let go of things. Delegate a lot and let others solve the issues in their way, using their skills and expertise. Be sure to enjoy when things turn up in another way than you expected.
Make mistakes and learn from them – ensure a culture where it’s really ok to make mistakes. A culture where you don’t try to avoid making mistakes or try to find who did the mistake and blame them. Instead celebrate the mistake and learn from it. Most important as a manager here is to really walk the talk and do the same thing as you say.
Communicative skills – keep the communication open and transparent in all directions so that everyone knows where to find the information needed and communicate when things needs to be acted on. Listen (don’t just hear) what people are communicating and act. Also use communication as a learning tool so that every day gives a learning experience.
Together – we do this together. This is really of utmost importance as no one can have all the skills, expertise, know the solutions and work on complex issues alone. No one has the answer by themselves. Especially the manager does not know everything in the complex world we are living in. Those working close to the library users usually are the ones with the best solution and they need to get the mandate and tools to act. Other businesses and organizations have skills within their areas. Find those, collaborate and network and make them flourish. We need to do it together.

For us at Helsingborg City Libraires it was also important to use the City Expo so that everyone within the staff could get the opportunity to learn new things from everything going on during the expo. We therefor decided that all staff could use up till 8 hours each, to take part and participate in different events to improve their skills and to get inspired by what others do. Often you can get new ideas for your library business by talking and listening to other kinds of services and see how they meet different challenges. We used this as a learning opportunity. And importantly, we did not ask for details on what the staff did, we trusted that they used this time to learn for their and the libraries’ future.

Further information on the H22 City Expo is available at: www.h22cityexpo.se

Information on different innovations we have worked on in the city can be found at: https://innovation.helsingborg.se/en/

by Catharina Isberg, Library Director, Helsingborg Sweden

Webinar Developing a Successful Poster Session

If you missed the online webinar about developing a successful poster session you now have the chance to follow the recording, thanks to ALA https://ala-events.zoom.us/rec/play/upcoIritpmo3GtyU5QSDCvQsW47rfa-shiEc-vUNxRq8AXBSMVSvY7BAZOWUnrcrKNgpSlwQfQllyjJ3?startTime=1582724735000

CPDWL would be very grateful if you could complete after our short survey to improve the upcoming webinars https://survey.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8BrJHSMMyvYKV4p

Thanks to the moderator and presenters and we are happy to continue this fruitful work of creating webinars with NPSIG and ALA.

We also look forward to receive your recommendations for topics of webinars for next year.

Webinar: The Portfolio Process: Capturing and Documenting Your Workplace Learning

Pattern Research Inc. offers a free webinar on Wednesday, March 11, 2020 12:00 PM MDT: The Portfolio Process: Capturing and documenting your workplace learning.

This programme can apply to a broad audience inside and outside of the library community, from people starting their careers to people looking to advance in their workplaces to people wanting to document their accomplishments and abilities for current and future employers, as well as people wanting to track informal learning in CE classes and experiential opportunities.It`s interesting for adult educators and trainers, human resource personnel, career coaches, college counselors and instructors, and anyone who helps other people, formally and informally, with their careers.

Career portfolios document evidence that you’ve learned and mastered skills in your workplace, in continuing education, and in formal classrooms. How evidence is documented might be dictated by institutional guidelines. You can create portfolios to earn college credit, record workplace success for evaluations, and present your independent learning and accomplishments to a future employer.

Career portfolios aren’t just about experience; they capture what you have learned, mastered, and applied and how to document and translate that knowledge to satisfy the requirements of employers and higher education.

AGENDA

– Introduction: The Portfolio Process
– The Key Idea: Learning Versus Experience
– What Comprises A Successful Portfolio?
– Student Projects
– College And Professional Certification Programmes
– Workplace Evaluations
– Job-Hunting And Career Development

OUTCOMES

– Write a workplace autobiography.
– Create and maintain a current career portfolio.
– Document past successes.

Free registration https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/1136530389893044748

Thanks to Ray Pun for the information.

Managing conflict for Supervisor Success

One of the American Library Association (ALA) LearnRT workgroups has produced a new manager training module about Managing Conflict.

The key learning objectives are:

Supervisors will manage healthy relationships between themselves and their peers by fostering a positive and mutually supportive workplace environment.
Supervisors will foster healthy relationships among staff by effectively navigating conflict and resolving differences, skillfully engaging in difficult conversations and finding mutually successful outcomes.

You can follow on https://www.webjunction.org/news/webjunction/managing-conflict-for-supervisor-success.html

Thanks for the information to Jana Varlejs

CPDWL Coaching initiative: Campaign for volunteer coaches

The coaching method has been explored by the Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning Standing Committee over the years, as part of Satellite Conferences and as part of the IFLA WLIC programme. Since 2019 CPDWL is collaborating with Management & Marketing Section on the Coaching initiative.

We are now very pleased that the Coaching initiative was approved by the Professional Committee of IFLA for the next three years 2020 to 2022.
At the WLIC 2020 n Dublin the session will focus again on individual coaching, and the format will be a drop-in/walk-in session where coaches are prepared to meet the delegates that want to be coached. As was the goal of the 2019 session, CPDWL and M&M aim to offer coaching in all IFLA languages this year too, as well as any additional language spoken by volunteer coaches.The purpose of the Coaching initiative is to support the coachee (the person who wants to be coached) in aligning organisational and individual goals to improve individual performance and to ensure that the organisation’s mission is achieved.

Coaching focuses on asking open questions, and allowing the coachee to come up with the solution. This differs from mentoring which mainly focuses on giving advise.

In order to give the coaching session, we need many coaches. Maybe you are one of them? If you have experiences in coaching or if you are interested in developing your coaching skills, you are very welcome to contact us!

During Spring term 2020 an online coach training programme will be given in the format of webinars, in order to prepare for acting as coach at the WLIC coaching session. Vera Keown, member of M&M SC and Certified Leadership Coach, is planning the training programme and will be instructor at the webinars.

Since we aim to offer coaching in many languages, we are also interested in knowing if you can coach in any of the IFLA languages or your mother tongue.

Please send your expression of interest to: Carmen Lei carmen@ift.edu.mo or Barbara Schleihagen schleihagen@bibliotheksverband.de.

For further information about CPDWL’s coaching initiative, please contact: Ewa Stenberg , Convenor of the Coaching initiative ewa.stenberg@mau.se.

More general information about the Coaching Programme here https://www.ifla.org/cpdwl/projects

The coaching work group: Ewa Stenberg, Almuth Gastinger, Barbara Schleihagen, Carmen Lei, Ulrike Lang, Vera Keown

IFLA Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning (CPDWL) Section Blog

Inspiring information professionals write about continuing professional development and workplace learning in order to build strong librarians and libraries for the future!