Midwinter Friday: Forum on Library Education

At the Forum on Library Education, four supporters of the Draft Core Competences Statement, which is scheduled to be considered for Council approval at the Council II session on Tuesday, discussed the statement and took questions from the crowd of about 60 attendees. While acknowledging that the draft statement is more general than some—including some of the assembled crowd—may desire, the panel argued that the generality is not a defect. "I've had comments about areas of librarianship that have not been included," said Linda Williams, coordinator of library media services at Anne Arundel County (Md.) Public Library. "If you included every area or specialty of librarianship, you wouldn't have the core anymore. You'd have the whole field." "I think the generality of the core competences is their strength," added Janet Swan Hill, associate director for technical services at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It's easy for people to focus on omissions when they are in areas of particular passion, but if "you can spend some time [looking], it's there, it's subsumed under something else."