Core Competencies for Electronic Resources Librarians #alamw14
How I missed adding Dr. Sarah Sutton’s presentation of Electronic Resources Core Competencies to my scheduler, I’ll never know. But, thanks to Twitter, I got there in time to catch the key points, just after Sutton’s overview of the competencies themselves.
Sutton gave high praise to many of the unique ways (mostly academic) libraries are already putting the competencies into practice. Most are using them to analyze, restructure, and define workflows and staffing, either at the department or unit level, and even across the entire library. The latter speaks to a significant takeaway of the competencies, that in most cases “one person can’t possibly do all of this”. The competencies document emphasizes how they are not a set of competencies for an e-resources librarian, but a focus on the collaborative nature of managing these resources throughout the organization. Other applications Sutton shared include informing MLS course programming and continuing education opportunities for both professionals and paraprofessionals, and creating job descriptions and hiring advertisements. The audience provided additional applications, such as assessing and targeting specific areas of strengths and weaknesses.
Sutton plans to continue her research by investigating how the competencies shape student learning outcomes in MLS programs. For myself, I see connections to my research interest in organizational communication, as well as pursuing the question of how you develop training in these competencies, especially in such amorphous concepts as “tolerance for ambiguity and complexity”. How do you practice that, and how do you measure it?!
There was an important final question from the floor that spoke to how these competencies relate to Emery & Stone’s Techniques for E-resources Management (TERMS). Sutton aptly addressed the similarities between the two, while noting the two have differing approaches — TERMS being more practical in nature and the Core Competencies being more conceptual, addressing the knowledge skills, and abilities of the people doing the work of e-resources management. I shared my agreement with others in the audience that the two are complementary, pointing out that I posed a very similar question for the TERMS project — imagining how techniques mapped to the e-resources life cycle could extend to mapping improved workflows and organizational communication.
The nature of e-resources evokes themes of constant change and adaptability. As such, the process for updating these competencies, according to Sutton, will be ongoing, and the opportunities for training and other applications of the competencies will continue to evolve. It will be interesting to see how the programming takes shape for the upcoming ER&L, and especially NASIG’s Annual Conference in Fort Worth, as its call for proposals were modeled on these Core Competencies.
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