I’m Sharon Streams, and I’m the Senior Manager for Community Services at WebJunction.
And I can tell you about what WebJunction is; it is an online learning community for
library staff.
So it’s really connecting library staff across, mainly the US, but and beyond, around
issues and learning that they need in order to maintain relevant vibrant libraries.
And what is it in terms of that set of things that you do that you think is relevant to
21st Century skills such as collaboration, creativity or ICT skills?
Yeah, I would say collaboration is really the foundation of what WebJunction is.
At the start WebJunction was created as a collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation and a number of state libraries around the country, to support libraries across
the nation and then we take the knowledge and the skills of library staff across all
of those libraries and we give them a space to share that knowledge with each other.
And therefore to solve real life on the job problems from something as simple as ‘how
do I fix my broken printer’ to ‘how do we make sure that we have a library that is
relevant and vibrant going forward into the future’.
Is there a good example of a single project that you can point to with sort of a best
practice or of what you have done effectively in 21st Century skills space?
Yes, well, it’s interesting, we’ve been using the very blueprint for the 21st Century
Skills that IMLS created for direct work with the project that we’re working on right
now in collaboration with the State Library of North Carolina.
We are helping to deliver training to public libraries in high need areas to support the
job seekers and unemployed in their communities.
And of course we know that libraries are places that are getting inundated with patrons who
are needing computer use and online search use and just information and knowledge in
order to find employment or services that they need to maintain for their living while
they are looking for work.
And so one thing that we did is we took the IMLS skills across that framework of collaboration
and communication and technology and partnership and such, and we created a version of it that
was specific to serving the needs of job seekers, small business entrepreneurs, unemployed and
so we just took those core questions and said, ‘okay, what does a librarian do in order
to be 21st librarian in that space.
Terrific, thank you very much.
Appreciate it. �