180+ event participants discovered the Biblio project and its offer for librarians

187 participants joined the Biblio’s first international online event “Boosting Digital Skills and Competences for Librarians” on 31 March 2021.

The event was organised by ALL DIGITAL and Biblio Consoritum within the All Digital Week 2021 campaign and was aimed at presenting the project’s key findings and offers.

Biblio “Boosting digital skills and competences for librarians in Europe” is an Erasmus+ / KA2 / Sector Skills Alliances in VET project, which addresses the skills gap in the library sector due to digital transformation that is changing the role of libraries and library professionals. The project targets library professionals and unemployed people in the library sector by enabling them to offer innovative services for users.  It facilitates the acquisition of digital and transversal skills for library professionals by setting up a system for skills assessment, learning offer, validation, and recognition. It is implemented during 2019-2022 by a consortium of 10 partners from Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and Latvia.

The event started with the welcome and introduction of the host – European Association ALL DIGITAL and its flagship campaign All Digital Week – from the organisation’s CEO Peter Palvolgyi. Peter talked about the variety of activities that ALL DIGITAL and its members are doing to enhance digital skills of Europeans and invited all to be digital heroes by joining the campaign.

Ekaterina Clifford from ALL DIGITAL moderated the event and gave a brief overview of the project at the start.

The Biblio’s scientific coordinator Prof Nicola Barbuti from University of Bari Aldo Moro in his keynote presented the concept of expended endless libraries. Prof Barbuti emphasized that the new digital librarians should be the promoters of innovative interactions with the user. Only in this way, the library itself can become an activator of interest. The new digital librarians will be called upon to manage the “Expanded Endless Libraries”, the places where not only librarians will play a fundamental role but also the users themselves.

With this food for thought, participants delved into the discovery of what our Biblio project has found out from the research on skills and training needs in the library sector. Research findings and the two emerging job profiles that have been developed as a result were presented by Tiana Zignani from Public Libraries 2030. You can check the details about CEGO and DIGY here: Community Engagement and Communication Officer and Digital Transformation Facilitator.

Associate Professor Dr Kalina Ivanova of University of Library Studies and Information Technologies ULSIT  then continued with the reflections on how the pandemic changed the vocational education and training and professional training of librarians in particular, how institutions had to adapt to those challenges, and whether the distance learning would stay the preferred means of training for years to come.

That flowed into our next presentation about Biblio methodology and training course which takes into account all those challenges that currently VET providers and librarians face and offers a modular approach catering to librarians with different initial levels of digital skills. Dr Mara Jakobsone from Data Media Group introduced the training training methodology and curricula for these two roles – CECO and DIGY – and explained the benefits and rationale of the training.

Finally, Eleni Georgakakou of DAISSy Research Group of Hellenic Open University described the first part of the training – the upcoming Biblio MOOC for library professionals. Eleni underscored that the MOOC will be delivered in English and it is open for ALL library professionals from any country.

You can check all the presentations from speakers as well as watch the full event or its specific parts using the links below:

by ALL DIGITAL

Featured image by Jonathan Singer on Unsplash