Continuing Professional Education for the Information Society: The 5th World Conference on Continuing Professional Education for the Library and Information Science Professions

Citation

Turner, R. (2003), "Continuing Professional Education for the Information Society: The 5th World Conference on Continuing Professional Education for the Library and Information Science Professions", New Library World, Vol. 104 No. 9, pp. 380-381. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074800310493198

The Continuing Professional Development Round Table (CPERT) offers a forum for educators and trainers who have an interest in the management and provision of continuing professional development programmes. With the increasing importance of information and knowledge management, there is a need for information professionals to continue to upgrade their skills and knowledge, especially in information technology. Information professionals must take responsibility for their own professional development.

Hence, the papers presented to the 5th World Conference of CPERT explore the theme of continuing professional development for the information society. The range of papers presented reflects the diverse cultures of the Round Table members.

The 26 papers are divided into three broad sections: CPE: developing tomorrow’s leaders; developing global CPE; and quality issues in CPE.

The first of these sections addresses strategies for individual institutions to promote continuing professional development. A number of the papers concentrate specifically on information literacy through a range of methods including knowledge management and information literacy partnerships in the workplace, cognitive apprenticeships and ICT training models. This aspect of professional development also includes contributions on user education and a case study of French secondary schools. Other papers look at succession planning strategies, as well as case studies of Australian and Indian libraries. A further article particularly addresses the need for continuing professional development for cataloguers and indexers.

Leading on from the local strategies, a further selection of papers concentrate on developing global continuing professional development. This section does provide some specific case studies of Canada and South Africa, but the emphasis is on the wider issues of co‐operation and worldwide professional education. For example, there are articles on East‐West co‐operation between biomedical university libraries and trans‐border projects in Mexico‐Texas. The challenge of internationalism via the Internet is discussed in several papers, including Web‐based library and information science education. The issue of distance learning is also covered by Pamela Barron.

Of course, the danger of wholeheartedly adopting continuing professional development is that training may be done for training’s sake, the relevance of the education may be neglected and there is an issue of the standard of training. The third section of this collection of papers takes a cursory look at some of these issues. Jana Varlejs discusses quality control and assurance, Clare Walker assesses problems of assessment and quality assurance and Jitka Hurych writes an intriguing article on competence and professional ethics.

In general, there is a feeling that the papers are a rather scatter gun approach to the issue of continuing professional education for the information society, but this may be a criticism of most collections of conference papers. Individually, the papers are well researched and interesting, especially for library managers. With library and information science qualifications now really just a stepping stone into a dynamic and ever‐changing profession, continuing professional development is an essential part of any information worker’s role in order to ensure that their skills are current, competent and relevant to the job they perform in a global society. Many of the ideas and case studies in this collection will provide inspiration and advice to either the individual information professional or those managers responsible for continuing professional development programmes.