Making it happen for rural libraries and their communities
Last week I took a tour of the Fayetteville Free Library. Fayetteville is famous for their innovative labs and collection management, their programs and their building. They are the library people tour and immediately say “It was so great, but we can’t do that here.”
One of the “so great” things about Fayetteville is that every professional staff person is trained to assist patrons in all the programs and resources offered at the library. Every person, every resource. They still have their individual passions and strengths, but they are all capable of assisting their community members use any resource the library has available.
In rural libraries we are typically isolated, underfunded, and understaffed. This best practice falls on closed ears. We don’t have the time, the money, or the resources to gain the skills necessary to assist our patrons on all the resources the library has to offer, especially digital resources like our online collection, building a web portfolio, creating a professional quality presentation, or personal branding in social media.
STLS has developed a PAID training program for our rural library staff so that they can acquire the skills they need to assist their public in these critical and underserved digital literacy tasks.
Last night I sent out flyers for the Expanding Community Education through Libraries program. Participants in any of the sessions in this workshop series is paid $100/training day (funded through a generous grant from the South Central Regional Library Council), is reimbursed for mileage from their home library and the training library site, learns or refines a digital literacy skill, and develops a program to be delivered at their home library.
We at STLS believe that improving the ability of each of our libraries to handle the questions of our communities today and tomorrow will improve the lives of our members. We developed this program to reduce barriers to needed skills training for every person in our system. For more information on how you or your staff can participate, including training topics, dates, and times, please visit http://www.stls.org/excel.
In learning and in libraries,
Margo
