Thanks to Barbara Band, who highlighted this on School Librarians Network,  I did this course on advocacy earlier in the year.

University_of_TorontoX: LA101x Library Advocacy Unshushed

 This was a MOOC that I undertook earlier this year after it was mentioned by Barbara Band, who is one of the guest speakers during the course.  Whilst this was run by a Canadian university there was still a huge amount of interest to those of us in Europe.  Perhaps some of the most important sections were when local politicians spoke about what gets through to them and what  they will give time to.

Advocacy is something that we have not been good at in the library profession.  we know what we do and how important it is, but we are terrible at letting others know.  We are also not good at saying how we can link in to the agendas that the power brokers have.  It always seemed to be “this is what we offer – take it or leave it”  Luckily we have moved on and are much more likely to work with colleagues in partner groups and organizations.  However I think many school librarians feel as if the struggle is still on to work with their teacher colleagues.

Maybe it is just me but since the advent of the world wide web it seems that everyone thinks they can be an expert. Of course if they put in enough time and effort then they can be experts, but I think  this thing of “anyone can do anything” can lead to all kinds of problems, not least being that libraries can be run by volunteers.  However that is one subject I am steering clear of today

One of the main things that the MOOC looked at was links to the community and this is also very much the central theme that David Lankes explores with his book “New Librarianship”, although it is old librarianship as far as I am concerned.  He has also produced a MOOC on the subject which uses his book as a framework, so it might be useful to people if it is run again in the future.

I am really looking forward to hearing other people’s views about advocacy as this is a topic relevant to all parts of the profession and hopefully we can all learn from each other.