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Weekly News Digest
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February 19, 2009 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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WebJunction Offers Guide to Library Management Competencies
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 be more successful in their work. Library Management Competencies, available at www.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 the site’s 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. 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 website, and it 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 members with essential skills for today’s libraries. As part of this grant, WebJunction staff members 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 the full Competency Index. Library staff members can use the statements to identify skills they should have or want to develop, to create job descriptions, or to develop training programs. In 2002, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded OCLC (www.oclc.org) a 3-year grant to build WebJunction as a portal for public libraries and other organizations that provide open access to information. WebJunction is supported in part by OCLC, grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (www.gatesfoundation.org) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (www.imls.gov), partners in state library agencies and other library systems and organizations, and by the library community. Launched in 2003, WebJunction is based in Seattle and Dublin, Ohio. Source: WebJunction
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Brandi Scardilli
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