Isabel Millward, Community Librarian- Services, Selwyn District Council, New Zealand
We are a small library service with four libraries and one mobile library. We are staffed with four
community librarians who are full time and each branch has four part-time customer service officers. We are located
in two urban centres and two rural centres, which very much influences the staff we can attract to roles in each library.
Our first take up of the lowest-cost course was a trial, to see where it was pitched, and now we are moving forward with
offering this to staff who are new to libraries or have less than two years’ experience working in a library.
The mid-cost courses are offered to staff with some working experience, and they are allowed to choose the module
the wish to study – however initially their community librarian will be looking for a good spread of the courses for
their team – but we plan on having staff complete all modules eventually. One of our community librarians is going to
take an Manager level course if she can get time.
Because our staff are part time (no-one is more than 20 hours per week), and also quite busy at work, we have some criteria for undertaking the courses.
The courses should be accommodated in ‘work time’
and staff can use 1.5 hours per month of allocated training time if they are not managing to get meaningful periods of
time to follow the course. The staff manage this themselves; managers don’t get involved in rostering any of this.
We have allocated a deadline of 6 months for completion of courses. This is largely to
accommodate the busy period of library work combined with annual public holidays, staff leave etc. To date,
staff have completed modules in 2-3 months.
We have built the Opening the Book courses into our induction programme so that as we set goals for new
staff this becomes part of our 3-6 month objectives, but we haven’t as yet picked up on the assessment
support area of the courses or included them in staff appraisals.
Staff have been keen to do these courses, so no need to motivate – I think staff like these courses as they
are an effective alternative to formal qualifications, which take a long time and are expensive for individuals
(even when the library will pay 50% of fees on successful completion of a paper) – the library pays all
the costs for Opening the Book!
We are currently part way through a period of intense transformation of our library service – but what I
see as the impact of Opening the Book courses is that staff start to ‘get’ what we are trying to achieve,
(for example, supporting our systems and processes for appraisal and discards, first impressions count,
displays that increase circulation) and they support those goals and can move towards the new services
and service delivery models more comfortably.