IMLS National Leadership Grant #LG-01-03-0071-03

Interim Performance Report

February 2005 through August 2005
Karen Strege, Project Director
206-723-2464. kstrege@msn.com

Background:
The Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded a Leadership Grant in 2003 to the Western Council of State Libraries (Council) to support "The Continuum of Library Education" project. This project seeks to develop a multi-state approach to address the universal need for trained library personnel in rural and underserved communities.

The project began in November 2003 with the hiring of Catherine Helmick as Project Director. Ms. Helmick focused on developing a set of core competencies, with Western Council's State Library Directors and their staffs. The competencies represent a consensus opinion about what is the essential knowledge, skills and ability for public library practitioners, defined by the project as, "an individual who is a library director or manager and has no library science degree and requires additional formal library training to improve job performance and/or to achieve certification".

Ms. Helmick resigned in March 2005 and Karen Strege replaced her as Project Director the same month.

Status of Project Goals and Objectives:

Goal 1: Westco and higher education institutions will collaborate to enhance learning opportunities that are needed for library practitioners.

Objective A. All participating SLAs will accept a set of core competencies for library practitioners.

Status: Western Council members approved the core competencies at their September 2004 meeting. To enhance the competencies and promote their use, the Project Director and the Task Force charged with developing a Council certification program, decided to survey a limited number of newly hired library practitioners and library boards to determine which competencies are most important to these two groups. Led by Karen Strege and Dr. Keith Swigger, member of the project Implementation Committee, this process is intended to prioritize the competencies, which will help the Council and participating states modify or create targeted certification and training programs.

Objective B. All library practitioners in each state will be able to select from local, on-site and/or distance education opportunities that address the core competencies.

Status: Webjunction, a project of OCLC, is the recipient of an IMLS grant to investigate establishing an E-learning Clearinghouse. This clearinghouse may provide the vehicle needed to offer a catalog of courses to library workers in Council states.

Most recently, Ms. Strege and Sara Jones, the State Librarian of Nevada and Chair of the Implementation Committee, met with Marilyn Gell-Mason, Executive Director, Webjunction, and Elizabeth Kellison, Content Manager, to discuss the possibility of adding fields regarding the competencies and certification programs to the E-Learning Clearinghouse records. Ms. Mason and Sarah Chesemore, Project Director, MPAC, will join the Implementation Committee at their September 2005 meeting to continue discussing the clearinghouse and other endeavors.

Objective C. All state library agencies participating will recognize the certification of all other participating states.

Status: The State Librarians of Iowa, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Washington and the Assistant State Librarian of Texas formed a Task Force that advised the Project Director on methods to encourage reciprocity. To date, the State Librarians in Iowa, Nebraska, Utah, and Montana have agreed to pursue adopting policies that enable them to offer reciprocity to certificate holders from other states or regional or national associations.

Objective D. Council will develop and adopt a region-wide certification program that is coordinated with other states' programs.

Status: Council established a task force, composed of members from Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Texas to, to develop models for a Council certification program for consideration by the Council. This task force met on July 26 2005. As noted above, this task force recommended that the competencies be prioritized before the certification program is designed. During this process, the task force will provide valuable feedback to the survey design and its promotion. After the survey is complete, this group will reconvene to design a certification model for presentation to Council at its spring 2006 meeting.

Goal 2: Library practitioners can receive formal and informal library education leading to certification or credit to enhance their ability to serve their communities.

Objectives:

1. A minimum of 15% of practitioners in each state or 20% of library practitioners from within the region will participate in a Westco certificate program.
2. 70% of practitioners participating in the project will report that the training helped them achieve a core competency.
3. 50% of practitioners will report that learning a core competency improved their job performance.
4. 75% of practitioners will report the certification process as successful in the realization of their career goals.

Status: These four objectives require measurements of practitioners who participate in state or the Council's competency-based certification programs. The Implementation Committee directed the project's evaluators, Chuck McClure and Jon Bertot, to design data collection methods and tools for states and Council to use to measure the outcomes of practitioners who participate in these certification programs.

The State Librarians of Arizona and Washington, which do not offer certification to practitioners, have agreed to participate in the evaluation development. Two State Librarians who manage certification programs, Texas and Nevada, have also agreed to participate. The evaluators have interviewed each of these State Librarians and key personnel to start developing tool sets for evaluations.

Goal 3. Westco will design an infrastructure to support multi-state recruitment and training efforts that can be sustained at the conclusion of the project

Objective A. At least 25 SLAs and 10 higher education institutions will participate in the project and commit to ongoing participation, as other entitles are recruited to the project.

Objective B. Infrastructure and agreements will support the continuation of the project.

Status: Council and the Project Director consider sustainability within the context of each project objective and activity. The Project Director is paying close attention to developing partnerships that will enable project continuation. Examples of these endeavors are discussions with Webjunction and ALA's leadership regarding the association's projects regarding certification.

Project schedule:

Because of the change of Project Director and opportunities for partnerships, in particular with Webjunction, not anticipated by the original grant proposal, Council requested that IMLS grant a year extension from August 1, 2006 to June 30, 2007. The Council also requested approval to expend the balance of the IMLS funding not spent during the first and second year of the project to fund project activities during the third year of the project and the following one-year extension. The Council will use unexpended funds from the first two project years to fund the director's salary, clerical assistance, website development and maintenance, accounting costs, and travel for the project director and Implementation Committee. Council did not request IMLS funding for any new expense category.

Certification:

In submitting this report, I certify that all of the information is true and correct to the best of my knowledge.

Karen Strege, Project Director
August 30, 2005