In the library sector, there is evidence that individual roles have expanded to include digital responsibilities. An analysis of job descriptions for curators in the US library and museum sector highlighted the interplay between professional knowledge, technical skills (such as understanding software, web mark-up languages, relational databases, digital repositories) and digital knowledge (understanding metadata) (Jeonghyun, Warga, & Moen, 2013).
At the same time, the number and content of activities supported by local libraries and national libraries are increasingly changing. Within the EU, according to the Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group of Liber Europe, nowadays libraries are regularly re-assessing existing services and offering new ones. In addition to being a traditional place for study, libraries now host events, provide training and offer recreational and cultural activities. The versatility and uniqueness of services and the multitude of tasks require the contemporary librarians to develop and maintain advanced competences. This is, in itself, positive but produces a serious skills gap.
BIBLIO offers a new educational framework for library staff and researchers in order to be able to cope with a myriad of topics: electronic resource management, data access, blockchain, and text and data mining, to name a few. In order to support these activities, we will support libraries in enriching and diversifying their in-house pool of competences, broader than those possessed by a “traditional” librarian, both to adapt library infrastructure to new technologies and to pass on digital skills to users. BIBLIO revolutionize the librarians’ professional preparation by reshaping the concept of the librarian profession.
