Great Professional Development Tools, Databases, and Courses for Library Workers
Announcing a brand new way for staff to demonstrate their expertise in recommending books! Learn with NoveList now offers the Introduction to Readers’ Advisory Certification, built around a curated set of our courses that cover the essentials of modern readers’ advisory. By helping staff build confidence, the certification gives libraries a great starting point for investing in their reading culture. If you’re not yet using Learn with NoveList, we’d love to show you exactly what our learning platform is all about: practical training, friendly guidance, and real support for the work library staff do every day.
When most folks think about professional development in a library capacity, they’re thinking about the conferences—the Annual Conference of the American Library Association (ALA), the ones put on by large organizations that are either affiliated with or subsets of the ALA, or even big regional conferences like the Texas Library Association. But conferences, while offering a great variety of both Professional Development (PD) and networking opportunities, can be a barrier to even the best-paid library staff, whether the issue is traveling out of state or being too short-staffed to cover the hours short of an emergency.
In the aftermath of the COVID lockdown, we began to see more online and asynchronous opportunities for work and professional growth across all disciplines. Since then, library work has continued to lean in that direction, with online opportunities for learning and professional development popping up even more, along with some of the more traditional methods of maintaining any library’s learning culture. Here are a few of those options for library workers in any role.
WebJunction
WebJunction is where you can get the good stuff for free. These are courses and webinars that are very much library-focused, so if you’re trying to expand your skills to promote or otherwise level up in your library work, this is actually the first place you should go. All you need to do is create a free account (and subscribe to their newsletter!), and you can access countless webinars and courses. Most of them are easily completed in an hour, while others might require a bit more time and work.
ALA Store
If you like holding learning materials in your hand or reading on your ereader, the ALA Store is a great place to start. Their texts lean a little more academic, but you can find books covering topics from leadership to library history to genres and all kinds of other very niche kinds of books in the store. Also, if your library has a professional development budget, it should apply to acquiring books that everyone on staff can have internal access to.
ALA eLearning
The ALA Learning site can be a little overwhelming, and the browsing structure is surprisingly rigid for an organization that is connected to a vocation that is all about access and findability, but the actual content they make available is solid. This is their full database of courses and webinars (or, at least, the ones presenters have allowed them to retain), and there is a lot of good stuff, from big picture to very niche. There are courses that are very specific to librarianship, and others that provide contextual information for things related to our work. If you have the budget to pay for classes, you also have a good long time to take them. But there are also some things that are freely available for anyone to view. If you’re interested in the online course route and you or your library has the budget, you can also see what’s available on the Library Journal/School Library Journal e-learning site, or try Library Juice Academy, which offers asynchronous continuing learning courses.
RA for All
If you work in readers’ advisory of any kind (which is most people in public libraries and plenty of people in other types), you should be following Becky’s blog. RA for All has an extensive backlog of book reviews, RA theory, and lessons to learn, and continues to push out plenty of information. Becky is also available to do online and in-person instruction, sometimes with her partner in crime, Robin Bradford. I was able to take their Actively Anti-Racist RA Service for Leisure Readers course a couple of years ago, and as someone who has been talking about books for two decades, I still learned plenty of new ways to approach and understand how we talk about books and reading to all kinds of readers. You can visit RA for All and do plenty of deep dives, or subscribe to get it in your email and learn something new every few days.
Niche Academy
If your local public library has Niche Academy, it’s a great resource to explore, whether you are a public library worker or not. Every library can pick and choose what’s available on its site out of a selection of tutorials, and if it has the manpower, it can build its own. Some also have separate academies for their staff and the public. These tutorials cover very library-specific things, like how to navigate certain databases or other library resources, and also provide detailed instructions on using things like Microsoft 360 and Google. If your public library has Ryan Dowd’s de-escalation training for staff, you’ve already used it.
Your Partner Businesses and Organizations
This is going to be different for every library, but the companies you work with are going to have great resources very specific to them. The library I worked at for ten years was one of several libraries that use Bibliocommons as a web and catalog platform. Their annual BiblioCon and several monthly webinars and Zoom meetups were priceless to have access to. OverDrive has Libby intros every couple of months (and a lot of other stuff), and Kanopy offers quarterly town halls with information on new materials and old questions. Every database and platform provider loves to offer trainings to libraries, so never be afraid to ask for an online or in-person one from whoever in your library is their direct contact.
Critical Friends Groups and other leadership trainings
Libraries, whether they operate out of one building or several, involve a lot of different personalities and needs. Just like a for-profit business, being able to communicate and work in teams should be at the forefront of everyone’s back-of-house work, whether they are supervisors or not. The protocols offered in something like a Critical Friends Group help with problem solving and goal setting, which often get set aside for the more urgent fires of public service and budget cuts. But having this kind of knowledge in your organization (or something else that works for the personalities in your immediate space) can really help make something that’s a little dysfunctional function a little better. It’s not going to solve the problems, but it can help take the emotions out of issues that we all, as library workers, take a little too much to heart.
Finally, I can’t recommend utilizing your local and subject-specific organizations enough. The Arizona Library Association offers monthly webinars on interesting topics and hosts an annual conference. The Texas and California Library Associations are legendary, not just for their conferences, but for the resources they produce. The various ALA divisions, round-tables, and affinity groups also offer interesting professional development resources, though not always in a regular rotation. In a perfect world, every library with more than three staff members would have someone dedicated to staff learning, either in an individual role or as a department, and would be able to curate staff learning based on the community they serve and the work that they do. Until that happens, library workers can rely on the resources made available to them from other spaces.
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