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I’m Sharon Streams, and I’m the Senior
Manager for Community Services at WebJunction.

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And I can tell you about what WebJunction
is; it is an online learning community for

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library staff.

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So it’s really connecting library staff
across, mainly the US, but and beyond, around

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issues and learning that they need in order
to maintain relevant vibrant libraries.

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And what is it in terms of that set of things
that you do that you think is relevant to

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21st Century skills such as collaboration,
creativity or ICT skills?

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Yeah, I would say collaboration is really
the foundation of what WebJunction is.

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At the start WebJunction was created as a
collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates

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Foundation and a number of state libraries
around the country, to support libraries across

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the nation and then we take the knowledge
and the skills of library staff across all

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of those libraries and we give them a space
to share that knowledge with each other.

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And therefore to solve real life on the job
problems from something as simple as ‘how

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do I fix my broken printer’ to ‘how do
we make sure that we have a library that is

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relevant and vibrant going forward into the
future’.

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Is there a good example of a single project
that you can point to with sort of a best

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practice or of what you have done effectively
in 21st Century skills space?

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Yes, well, it’s interesting, we’ve been
using the very blueprint for the 21st Century

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Skills that IMLS created for direct work with
the project that we’re working on right

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now in collaboration with the State Library
of North Carolina.

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We are helping to deliver training to public
libraries in high need areas to support the

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job seekers and unemployed in their communities.

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And of course we know that libraries are places
that are getting inundated with patrons who

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are needing computer use and online search
use and just information and knowledge in

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order to find employment or services that
they need to maintain for their living while

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they are looking for work.

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And so one thing that we did is we took the
IMLS skills across that framework of collaboration

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and communication and technology and partnership
and such, and we created a version of it that

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was specific to serving the needs of job seekers,
small business entrepreneurs, unemployed and

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so we just took those core questions and said,
‘okay, what does a librarian do in order

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to be 21st librarian in that space.

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Terrific, thank you very much.

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Appreciate it.
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