On October 19th, 2011 a group of innovators from over 20 countries gathered in Salzburg, Austria to discuss “Libraries and Museums in an Era of Participatory Culture.” Through plenary panels and intensive break out group, the seminar fellows developed a series of challenges and recommendations.
One of those groups was charged with developing recommendations and challenges around skills needed by librarians and museum professionals in today’s connected and participatory world. This group ended up developing a joint library/museum curriculum.
While there will be a full report out of the session, I have already been talking about the curriculum and thought it would be useful to share it and discuss it here (with the permission of the participants). Over the next few days I will comment and expand on the curriculum from my perspective, but this post is intended to simply “get it out there” with little personal commentary so others can refer to it and add their own perspectives.
It is my hope that this post, the session report, and following commentaries will form the basis of a much more complete piece (article, book, or something else).
The following curriculum is meant to be comprehensive, and apply equally to librarians and museum professionals. It is also intended to inform formal methods of education (masters programs) as well as continuing education.
FRAMING:
The mission of librarians and museum professionals is to foster conversations that improve society through knowledge exchange & social action
Lifelong learning in & out of formal educational settings
These topics are equally applicable to librarians and museum professionals
These topics must be contextualized
The following values permeate these topics:
- Openness & transparency
- Self reflection
- Collaboration
- Service
- Empathy & Respect
- Continuous Learning/Striving for Excellence (which requires lifelong learning)
- Creativity and imagination
CURRICULAR TOPICS:
- Transformative Social Engagement
- activism
- social responsibility
- critical social analysis
- public programming – fitting to larger agenda
- advocacy (organizing communities to action-political, policy)
- sustainability of societal mission
- conflict management
- understanding community needs
- crowdsourcing / outreach
- ability to engage and evolve with technology
- ability to impart tech to community across generation
- creating and maintaining on effective virtual presence
- institutional sustainability (funding, relevancy)
- advocacy for institution
- economics
- ethics & values
- sharing: benefits & barriers
- collaborate within interdisciplinary teams
- collaborate
- assessment /analytics / impact
- preserve / safeguard
- collect
- organize
- communication
- intercultural: the ability to analyze and function in micro and macro cultures including age and gender
- languages / terminology
- support for multiple type of literacies
- constructed
- improvisation or innovation
- interpretation
- dissemination
- information seeking