Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal April 2007 Volume 5(2)

President's perspective

Continually asking questions

Lifelong learning should be just that – for life, not just for employment, says Christopher Phillips.

I’ve been reading Testament of Faith, the autobiography of that great teacher and explainer William Barclay. Although I’d always associated him with Glasgow, I was pleased to find that he was in fact born in Wick where his father was a bank manager at the time. The Highlands can’t claim too much of an influence on his mind though since he moved away when he was five and it was in Motherwell that he went to school. It’s clear from what he says that his teachers there were inspirational and that some of them would not today have been allowed to hold the positions now that they did then! Barclay reminds us that there are “…two kinds of education – one teaches us how to make a living and the other teaches us how to live.”

It is a particular hobbyhorse of mine that the current lifelong learning agenda seems to emphasise skills for employment at the expense of skills for life. Indeed re-reading the Executive’s lifelong learning strategy Life through learning: learning through life in preparation for a response to the recent consultation exercise, it struck me even more forcibly than before how the strategy seems to concentrate on employment skills for post-16 year old school leavers and misses out on many of the cradle to grave opportunities for learning.

Learning should be possible at any time, anywhere and for any purpose. People may learn to fulfil personal ambitions, further personal interests, get a job, develop a career or shape their community. Skills and knowledge can be acquired in many different places – in schools, colleges, learning centres, libraries, through work, at home, through leisure or in the family. Who knows what skills learned in one area of life may be applied elsewhere.

An important task for library and information professionals is to help learners overcome the barriers between these environments so that they can develop their own learning pathways and build on knowledge wherever it is acquired. We are uniquely placed to support learners through our selection, arrangement and promotion of information resources, and through the assistance we provide to customers in helping them to formulate the right questions, search for answers and evaluate results for relevance and currency.

Not only are our customers all learners in their own ways, but so are we. For me the time has come to look critically at how we acquire the skills we need to do our jobs and how we keep them up-to-date. In Highland we’ve been having difficulty for some time in attracting professionals

to a range of posts so we’ve been forced to look at other ways of filling vacancies by “growing our own”. This doesn’t just apply to libraries but has been noticeable in other professions such as teaching and social work. By providing additional support and linking with distance learning opportunities we’ve been able to offer the possibility of qualification to people without them having to move away from the area. We’ll need to explore different ways of getting fresh ideas and new blood if we are to avoid stagnation, but at least we are able to build on local experience and on the investment we’ve already made in our staff.

The success of this fresh approach and the process of job evaluation have combined to make me question the value in all cases of the large block of formative training that characterised the route that I and many others have taken into the profession – if I was ever entirely comfortable with it in the first place. With competency frameworks supported by national occupational standards the evidence offered by Chartership is no longer seen by Personnel Managers (well mine anyway!) as either exclusive or entirely relevant. Instead we have the opportunity of more focused learning opportunities based around specific needs which in time will build into something comprehensive, but which crucially do not have to be followed all at once.

For all of us (and especially for the chronologically rich like me) there is the challenge of keeping our learning up-to-date and learning new things. That’s where our professional association is so valuable to us all: through it we have the opportunity to meet colleagues share ideas and be challenged by seeing how things can be done differently in other places and other settings. I’m really fortunate to have learned so much from the wisdom and experience so generously given by others and from the opportunity to present what we have tried to do here in Highland. We should perhaps begin to look at changing the specifications for our post holders to reflect our emerging needs – not only requiring evidence of current skills and competencies but also demonstrating the commitment to continuing professional development. I’d like to see it as a requirement that each year we investigate practice elsewhere, in another library, another place or in another sector, and relate that back to the needs of our customers and institutions. Setting up such a systematic exchange of good practice and ideas should benefit us all and contribute to improving the quality of library experience for all our customers.

I welcome the new challenges that training for our profession in the 21st Century brings. It’s good for me to be bumped out of my complacency and to be forced to question what it is we need to do. In the book I mentioned above William Barclay quotes Mandell Creighton: “The one real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions.” I suspect I’m better at asking questions than I am at sorting out the answers but I’m looking forward to discussing some of these ideas as I meet with you over the coming months.

Information Scotland Vol. 5(2) April 2007

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