Educating Professionals for a Global Vision: No Past, No Future

Abstract

Since its beginning, IFLA has been concerned with education and training, creating guidelines and standards for educational quality. Ninety years after the first IFLA Conference, IFLA Satellite returned to the Vatican Library with the aim of stimulating a high-level conversation on the future of librarians. This article is a reflection on the IFLA’s role in the past and in the present for education and training and the impact of IFLA Global Vision on the education of new professionals. The main results of the conversation during the Satellite are that librarians are no longer the ones who mediate in a passive role between the communities and the collection but have been transformed into active agents of the community and, within it, “facilitators” of knowledge. The mutability of the global world context means that competencies must be reviewed and adapted to new operative instruments. The IFLA Global Vision and a focus on strong value bases may help librarians outline a more solid mission. Among the new disciplines emergent in the LIS context, technology and informatics are fundamental. The competencies in education have emphasized also the fundamental knowledge of research methods and critical abilities in analyzing the results. Nevertheless, librarians are not only users of research; they actively contribute to research and need practical abilities in programming and realization of research projects. From what emerged during the Rome Satellite, LIS is being enriched by new technological, ethical, and social aspects that should be inserted into future curricula and will become part of the librarian’s identity. The very rethinking of professional identity has in itself brought a transformation in the LIS discipline, in which the concepts of digital inclusion, social inclusion, and lifelong learning are central.

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