WebJunction, an online learning community for librarians and library staff, has released Library Management Competencies, a guide to courses and resources to help current and aspiring library managers to be more successful in their work. All WebJunction courses and programmes take place within its unique social learning platform, where people come together around course work and content to gain interactive learning experience available to library staff anywhere on the Web.
Available on WebJunction.org, Library Management Competencies includes links to related courses and resources that seek to help users build knowledge and skills and increase on-the-job effectiveness. By identifying the key aspects of managing a library and defining the associated knowledge, skills and behaviours, library managers will be better able to tailor their personal learning plans to address any gaps in their skills sets.
WebJunction's Library Management Competencies are the first set to be launched from the full Competency Index, an aggregate of competency statements that cover a broad spectrum of library practice and service. In the coming months, WebJunction will continue to roll out additional sections on the Website, and plans to produce the full Index as a WebJunction publication later this year.
The effort to build the Library Management Competencies into this learning platform began in 2006 when WebJunction received a Library Skills Training grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant was intended to increase WebJunction's capacity to meet library organisation needs to continually develop staff with essential skills for today's libraries. As part of this grant, WebJunction staff worked closely with the originators of many competency sets in the library field, as well as with a cadre of subject-matter-expert reviewers, to complete a full Competency Index. Library staff can use the statements to identify skills they should have or want to develop, create job descriptions, or develop training programmes.
