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In an educational environment growing increasingly digital, librarians need to re-evaluate the skills criteria necessary to continue exercising their profession.
In 2016, Meredith Schwartz, editor-in-chief of the Library Journal, wrote an article about the skills librarians need to adapt to 21st-century requirements. These included collaboration, communication, good people skills, creativity, innovation, critical thinking, data analysis, flexibility, leadership, marketing mastery, project management, and technology management.
The article appeared long before COVID-19 put the whole world in isolation and generated a slew of precautionary measures. Now, these questions must be asked: Is Schwartz’s list of skills still relevant? How many of these have librarians applied? Have they had a positive impact on the educational community?
The library and the community
Libraries were among the spaces most impacted by the mandatory lockdown. Today, they do not serve just the purpose of lending books; they have become spaces for integral development and alternative learning. In pandemic times, libraries had to expand their role of book repositories in favor of providing public spaces that serve as a refuge to meet the community’s basic needs.
“Libraries are one of the few places that one can enter without the expectation of consuming and paying for something,” says Darcy Brixey, a librarian in Seattle with 20 years of experience. Brixey emphasizes the value a library can have for vulnerable people, like students without homes and low-income families. Libraries provide space to do basic things like taking refuge from the cold or rain, going to the bathroom, getting kitchen utensils, or maintenance supplies.
“Libraries are one of the few places that one can enter without the expectation of consuming or paying for something.”
To provide these benefits, a librarian needs skills to navigate social work, human relationships, project management, and communication. So we could say that these skills suggested four years ago as necessary are current and crucial for the people who manage libraries to ensure their continuity for the people who use their services.
Digital well-being
Digital content offerings in libraries are not new, but current circumstances have motivated librarians to offer programs more robust in content and online activities. Librarians have transcended physical locations to maintain continuous learning and interactions in virtual spaces. Now they provide services online such as book and audiobook lending, access to magazines and newspapers, personalized recommendations for learning skills, reading out loud to children, conversation circles for older adults, and foreign language practices, among other activities.
To accomplish this, librarians must exercise critical thinking, data analysis, flexibility, leadership, and technology management. These are instrumental in creating a digital infrastructure that allows library services to remain in place during isolation. To publicize these services and keep connected with the community, librarians must have a working familiarity with the advanced communication and promotion methodologies used in marketing.
Over the past year, libraries had to reinvent themselves to support the students, teachers, and communities they serve. Do you believe schools and universities need to consider this kind of structural change to find a balance between the continuity of education and students and academic staff’s safety? Let us know in the comments.
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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