The blog of Elena Menéndez
Posts tagged information professionals
CILIP’s draft Body of Professional Knowledge and Skills
Apr 29th
As part of their Future Skills Project, CILIP has recently invited members to feed back on the first draft of the revised Body of Professional Knowledge and Skills. I have already submitted my comments using the online form, but I thought it would be useful to spend a little longer reviewing the document.
The proposed BPKS clearly tries to address the problems attributed to its predecessor, often criticised for being woolly and impractical. I certainly think it is a step in the right direction. The coverage is good and I like the matrix approach. It is obvious that CILIP have tried very hard to accommodate everyone and everything into this framework. Perhaps that is the problem with this draft: it is trying too hard not to miss anything. In fact, the introductory text on the consultation page is a bit of a give-away:
This consultation aims to identify any gaps and gauge opinion on whether the subject headings we have included are the right ones.
I did not find any gaps (although I am by no means an expert on some of the wheel wedges). For me, the issue was that there were far too many strands, too many headings and subheadings and quite a lot of repetition. Even without the descriptions, the list of “skills” is far too long.
If the new BPKS wants to become the standard competence framework the information industry, it needs to be, first and foremost, usable. It should communicate, pretty much at a glance, where you are as a professional, and what steps you need to take in order to move forward in your chosen career path. It also needs to work on variety of professional environments. In my opinion, making it too specific is a mistake and I believe there are some things that should be addressed.
- Soft skills: I see no point in having a section on communication skills. They are important, yes, but they do not define what we do. I feel the same about research skills or information synthesis competences (collating, abstracting, summarising…) These are common to professionals in most fields and the BPKS should focus on what differentiates library and information professionals from everyone else. I’m not even sure that the sections on ‘Professional confidence’ and ‘Leadership’ are necessary. Most of the headings in these areas are behaviours rather than skills, and they can be covered by the level of competence.
- Tools and technologies: I think there is too much detail about understanding technology and using certain tools. An information professional should be able to pick and choose the most relevant tools at the time, whether it is a thesaurus or social media or something we haven’t yet heard of. Listing particular names is only going to date the document and make it more difficult to maintain. At most, they should be included as examples, nothing else.
- Core skills and duplication: As I mentioned above, I did notice quite a lot of repetition across the document. For example, ‘evaluation’ and ‘financial management’ appear in more than one place and section 12 (strategic planning) ends up as a replica of section 11 (resource management). There are also strong connections between sections that could be merged together, e.g., section 8 (marketing and customer focus) is really a subset from 9 (service design). I think more could be done to distill the core skills that define the profession. Tina Reynolds makes an interesting point about giving a whole wedge of the wheel to Records Management (RM). My feeling is that although in some cases RM is very specialised and separate field, other times (or perhaps it would be better to say in some organisations) it is closely intertwined with information management and perhaps even librarianship. As someone who has worked for many years in hybrid role, I know very well how blurry the edges of professional areas can be. I am in favour of better definition of professional boundaries, because it provides clarity and helps people find support networks, but it has to be done in a way that is flexible enough to accommodate these role discrepancies. Perhaps a solution would be to focus not so much on the label, but on the tasks that record managers do, e.g. content creation, management and disposal. These are skills that are required outside strict RM.
- Self-assessment: The BPKS has a table linking qualifications, knowledge and skills, and competence level. However, professional competence is not just determined by qualifications and the skills definitions are quite woolly, which means the whole thing is too vague and subjective to be useful. Working through the toolkit and scoring oneself should be straightforward and consistent.
Neat solutions
Complex as it must be to come up with a solution that is concise, flexible and usable, I believe it can be done. I have read blogs drawing parallels to skills frameworks in other professions, e.g., law, surveying or health, but there are other examples that are much closer to home.
The Government Knowledge and Information Management (GKIM) Professional Skills Framework is one of them. CILIP have obviously used this framework to inform the new BPKS. It is referenced at the end of the draft and the section on “Using and exploiting knowledge and information” has been added pretty much verbatim. The framework clearly defines four categories with a business, user, process or compliance perspective. It also specifies four competency levels: practitioner, manager, leader and strategist.
Our IT department is currently being mapped to the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). The BCS (Chartered Institute of IT) also uses SFIA (branded SFIAPlus) as the basis for their career framework for IT professionals. SFIA is divided in six strands: strategy and planning; business change; solutions development and implementation; service management; procurement and management support; and client interface. And it has seven competence levels: follow; assist; apply; enable; advise; initiate/influence; and set strategy/inspire.
What I like about these frameworks is that they are manageable and very easy to interprete. They clearly identify professional pathways and link career stage to competence level, addressing the issue of consistent self-assessment quite effectively. In both cases, there is additional documentation fleshing out the detail, but even without it, I would be quite happy using tools like these to explain where my role fits in the big scheme of things.
I really hope the consultation process provides CILIP with useful feedback that allows them to address the remaining issues and come up with a solid solution. Oh, and I understand the consultation is still open until the end of Sunday 29th April, so if you still haven’t had your say, you better hurry up and send your feedback before midnight!
Can your social network replace a search engine?
Dec 1st
Last week I attended the CILIP CDG National Conference. The programme included a presentation by Phil Bradley on social media and why it is important to Librarians. It was a full-throtle, engaging talk explaining where social media is today and how its exponential growth is affecting the world of information. As always, Phil made very good points in favour of engaging with social media. We know this can be an issue for librarians, not always through personal choices, but because their organisations have decided that social media is BAD and should be blocked. Phil made powerful arguments for information professionals taking action and communicating the value of social media to their organisations.
One of these arguments was that social media have become the new way of finding information. Users no longer look for authoritative content on a company’s website, they expect the information to come to them via a combination of news feeds and recommendations on social networks. These may come directly from friends or as a result of the user’s browsing history.
I can’t possibly disagree with any of these points. However, what Phil said next gave me a lot of food for thought. Social networks (or rather the people that inhabit them) are not only replacing websites as authoritative sources, they are also taking the place of search engines as a way of finding information. I find this idea misleading and overly simplistic and this is why:
- I have observed people asking questions on Twitter and even asked some myself. Crowdsourcing information can be very effective, but the quality of the response depends on the subject of your enquiry and the appropriateness of your network. As with many things social media, I feel virtual and physical networks mirror each other. Tweeting “how do I make spaghetti carbonara?” will have a similar effect to turning around in the office and asking my colleagues. Obviously, going online increases my chances of getting a response, but the quality of the information I receive will always depend on how ‘expert’ my contacts really are. If you haven’t got the experts right, you may end up having to do a lot of filtering or even and worse of all, following incorrect information. It takes a while to develop a good network and, if like me, your job spans across various disciplines, you’ll need to include people from all these areas. Throwing random questions at them is likely to produce a lot of noise, in their direction and mine. For me, searching online for a carbonara recipe or looking at the cookbook on my shelf would be a quicker and more accurate way of finding the information I need.
- As an information professional, I feel I should always try and find an answer by my own means. This may just be a personal gripe, but I feel it is lazy to do otherwise. I’m often bemused by people going on Twitter and asking things like “does anybody know any good books on XXX?” Errr… couldn’t you have checked on Amazon? The information is already there. Also, much of the knowledge I need to do my job exists on technical lists, forums and wikis and the best way to find it is to use a search engine. Of course, if that doesn’t work, I would always try and ask those who may know, whether they are local or virtual contacts. However, there again, I would target a particular list or group, to make sure I get an informed response.
- Similarly, when I answer a question, particularly online, very often I’ll use a search engine somewhere along the line. I know there is a useful resource out there, but I’m not a walking encyclopaedia. Before I can send you the link I’ll have to Google it or search my Delicious bookmarks or whatever.
- Why should information professionals want to replace the search engine? By all means we – as any professional in any other area – should aspire to be experts in our field. That does not mean we have to have all the answers. As I said earlier, most likely we don’t and we’ve just used a search engine to find the link to that resource we were asked about. Search engines, like social networks are tools. What makes information professionals experts is their ability to master these tools and use them to meet the information needs of their users.
This is not meant to be a dig at Phil’s presentation. It was just one of many points he made and, I think the intention was good: to expose the importance of social media and encourage librarians to engage in social networks, even if it means having to sell them to their organisations. I just feel that generalisations like this may be harmful at a time when many people are confused about their role. Social media serve a very important purpose in enabling us to have, enhance and amplify conversations, to connect with likeminded individuals and to reach out to people on the other side of the planet at the click of a button. They transcend social barriers, they give a voice to multiple causes that would otherwise remain hidden. And yes, they are a source of information too, but replacing the search engine? I don’t think we are there yet. However, I would be very interested to see if anyone else has any other thoughts on the matter.