What is the first good idea you will steal and use in your library? This is one of the questions a buzzing room full of motivated and skilled public librarians discussed at a two-hour workshop at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney on June 9th. Other themes were what new skills our profession needs and what focus we should have as a profession to actively support leaning in our communities. We also talked about what new skill is on our own bucket list of things we want to learn in the near future.
I think it is very important that we as library professionals are active learners ourselves and that we have a plan for our own learning. This is another way of thinking of ourselves as learning professionals – and I believe it will sharpen our focus on the learning needs of our communities as well. I therefore recommend professional development programs like 23 Mobile Things (Proudly developed in cooperation with State Library of New South Wales own Mylee Jospeh and Kathryn Barwick)
One of the things I will be inspired by in the near future is this very interesting Lifelong Learning Strategy from the City of Canterbury
This is a very good example of a learning strategy that has focus on the community and communicates the importance of the library as an active strategic learning institution to both citizens and the political level.
Another document that was referred to at the workshop is this interesting article from New Zealand about adult learning (Thank you for sharing Michelle)
The more than 60 participants in the workshop had interesting ideas about working together with museums to share the knowledge they have about our communities in new and inventive ways within a library frame – New contacts will be made.
Ideas about how we reach the young people who lack digital skills by talking to the digital skills they actually already have were also a very interesting discussion.
We also shared experiences about makerspaces and agreed that it is more about sharing knowledge and creating stuff together than it is about technology.
Thank you to all of you who participated in the workshop. I was glad to have the opportunity to present my mindset about Global Librarianship for you – and to learn with you during our interesting discussions. I appreciate your feedback and your strong participation – it was a real pleasure to work with you.
And remember: Libraries make their communities smarter.
My slides:
This work by Jan Holmquist is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Jan Holmquist 