In our recent Focus on Learning we brought your attention to a new feature in the WebJunction Illinois Course Catalog – Competencies. Following is the official press release from WebJunction regarding the first offering of competencies in Library Management. NOTE: If you are a registered user of WebJunction Illinois you should view the Competencies in the WebJunction Illinois Course Catalog.

WebJunction connects library staff competencies to new social learning platform

Library Management Competencies is a guide to courses and resources to help current and aspiring library managers

DUBLIN, Ohio, February 12, 2009—WebJunction, the 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.

Library Management Competencies, available on WebJunction.org, includes links to related courses and dynamic resources that will 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 behaviors, library managers will be better able to tailor their personal learning plans to address any gaps in their skills sets.

All WebJunction courses and programs take place within its unique social learning platform, where people come together around course work and content to gain the most interactive learning experience available to library staff anywhere on the Web.

“We are thrilled to offer this first set of Library Management Competencies to the library field,” said Betha Gutsche, curriculum manager for the Competencies project, who also serves on the board of Continuing Libraries Education Network and Exchange (CLENE) Round Table of the American Library Association.  “We’re eager to learn how library managers begin using the competencies to identify and build the skills they need to manage libraries.”

“As with everything at WebJunction, we welcome input from the library field,” said Ms. Gutsche.  “Feedback from librarians and staff will help us move forward with implementing new sets of competencies over the coming year.”

There are two paths of discovery from competencies to learning resources at WebJunction.  For direct access, users can go to www.webjunction.org/catalog/coursecatalog/competencies to browse the list of Library Management Competency categories.  Click the Details & Learning button for each competency statement to see related courses as well as a guide to additional resources available on WebJunction.org.  Or, when browsing the Course Catalog, the Details page of any course associated with a competency will link to the associated competencies page.

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 Web site, 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 organization 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 programs.