Why collection development will be benefited from librarians’ life long learning

My roles, as other information professionals, as Hirsh wrote “to serve and transform their community (Hirsh, 2018, P. 6). This means with the rapid development of technology and demand of patrons becomes diversity than before, our career success rests upon how well we help our users to adapt to new technology, how easily our users access to technology and information and how creatively the learning space and learning opportunity provide to users motivate and engage them with technology and information. Therefore we need to be technology hub of our organization and community (Hirsh, 2018, p. 9). Once we offered those services, shall we stop here?

As Hirsh argued the library professionals should keep on life long learning to keep their knowledge and skills most updated and relevant to their profession. What’s more, she encourages library professionals to be global information professional via actively interact and exchange ideals through global network to get insight new emerging trend, be aware of the issues and concerns aroused from the trend and the best practice to effectively adopt the change and technology integration to organizations. The new trend not only helps information professional survive but also being a driving force leading the trend. (Hirsh, 2018, p. 5-12).Why do we need to be a leading force? The proliferation of AI makes robots can perform many of our duties. The robots may function better than human on those tasks. One thing Robots could not replace us is they are lacking of ability of thinking. This is why we must keep on learning and establish global network, which helps us know more, understand more and able to think beyond what we have been seeing. The kind of ability makes us live better and constantly and promptly provide service that satisfy the needs of our library users.

However, from case study <Using a Shared Leadership Model to transition to a new ILS & Discovery Service> (Van, 2015), we learned simply relying on library professional’s own lifelong learning and motivation being a global information professional cannot guarantee the successful completion of adapt to change. Effective leadership and adequate and right resource provision must be included (Rudasill, 2015, p. 153).

References:

Hirsh, S. (2018) Information services today: an introduction Secondary, (Ed., pp. 1-16). MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Rudasill, L.M., 2015. The IFLA Trend Report: Looking Beyond the Walls in Library Planning. Journal of Library Administration, 55(2), pp.1–12.

Van Kampen-Breit, D. et al., 2015. Using a Shared Leadership Model to Transition to a New ILS & Discovery Service: A Case Study. Library Leadership & Management (Online), 30(2), pp.C1–C12.