Our greatest success is the feeling of accomplishment our trainees feel. But let’s hear it from them!
This is Virginia Ravanelli talking about her experience attending the DIGY (Digital Transformation Facilitator) training course, from Italy.
In the next following weeks, we will get to know other trainees from all around Europe, make sure to follow us! #DigitalBiblio #WBLstories
1. Why did you decide to take part in the BIBLIO course?
Reading the course’s program, I have found all the module’s contents new and very interesting: different abilities to create meta data using the international standards and integrating them with the national blueprint written by ICCU, Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (I’m already a metadata librarian), deep knowledge in approaching the administrative face of library’s services and new capabilities in costumer’s privacy management, explanations and know-how for using digital tools in organizing a library’s work, such as how to create a survey, a business plan.
This course gives us not only content about daily activities like those of a librarian, but even tools toimprove efficiency, to solve difficulties, to offer better service and invite new readers to the library and live rich experiences in itsspace. A new vision brings a centuries-old mission through digital tools and contents to become a reality in library services: the access to a structured and verified knowledge and information is today all digital.
This idea doesn’t mean that analogical resources no longer have value, in fact digitization is a kind of preservation, the preferred type, to give access to our analogical collections, to preserve our roots. So, I choose this way to learn something that I haven’t heard about.
The approach to progress into the course and to interact with teachers and instructors is all digital, lessons and tests are both interactive and traditional (always an in person-teacher underlined our mistakes, but we can’t go forward without demonstrating our learning: the next lesson is accessed only by passing the previous lesson’s test).
Even the supporting content is various: video, podcast, vodcast, blog’s post, academic articles, enterprise’s web site, e-book, web book, wiki site and the very important fact is that all these resources are open educational resource (OER). We can find them freely available in the web: their author has already chosen this modality to disseminate knowledge.
The BIBLIO course is a trip into a library’s activities, which during the last few decades are running together with technology, considering digital tools an improvement for humanity. The last reason that brings me to enrol to this course is my job’s vacancy and the desire to meet other librarians.
2. What change do you want to make in your library?
I’d like to introduce digital contents and digital tools to patrons: not only the OPAC, today a discovery, but even digital library and digital collections, that are disseminated in cultural web sites. “Discovery” is a very inspired term to identify the role of the tool that provides access to all collection’s types: by using only a keyword I can find various resources to satisfy my needs, my curiosity and my entertainment. I’d like to infuse the meaning of an active library inside and outside the building through relations with the community, a library like a hub not only of information and knowledge, but even a humanities’ hub, a centre to meet, a place to enjoy both alone and together with others. I’d like that people, readers don’t have to knock on the library’s door, to knock on the library’s account to get access to the digital collection and OPAC, to read a newspaper. Why do you have to wait for already available information? Why do you have to ask about a right, which belongs always to us, since I drew on the wall to transmit my daily experiences? I’d like to use digital tools to communicate and preserve collections: metadata and social network to have easy access to knowledge and valid information and instruction, compass to navigate in this society during this fourth revolution. As for all other things, features come from traditional services to patrons, which can always be improved using today’s tools.
3. Tell us more about the work-based learning – how does it work, what do you expect from it, how do you work with your mentor?
I find my work-based learning really interesting, because it is the meeting point of traditional, analogical and digital collection. I’m working on conservation and preservation of an archive-library, such as Museo storico del Trentino, which is a special library, created to provide documentary evidence about our local history and art, always in an international environment. This library is already workinghard in history research, applying itself in communication through modern technology and tools. My mentor Caterina Tomasi is a graduate archivist and librarian. Immediately, at our first meeting together Rodolfo Taiani, manager of the archive, library andcollection, my mentor showed me the collection, the methodology to preserve and store data. At first, I saw shelves with the original collection from the 20th century with the original signature on the spine. Then the compact shelves, where books, bound newspaper, journal and periodical in polyethylene envelopment, books in cardboard’s box and folders are stored. On the first floor is the physical archive, which preserves even Cesare Battisti’s archive. I also saw new ways to store and preserve any kind of object: flag, negative, compact disc, DVD, correspondence, weapons, painting and printing and so on. We took a tour in the library and archive to look at storage features and modality. Now I’m writing about it following the example of BIBLIO course, using OER. In fact, the great cultural institutions around the world research the best methodologies to store all kinds of archive, with the library and museum’s support. A simple app will explain all this contents. I’m using digital tools such as Drive to share documents and resources that I have organized in the library’s server. I have found experience and knowledge go together and support each other in a really unique way.
4. What is, in your view, the future role of libraries?
I think that the library has to collaborate with the community and must become a secure point in society, a digital and physical place where questions can find an answer through the world of knowledge and information. Libraries shouldn’t be only a boost to learning, but even a cultural and fun hub in general, without forgetting the semantic content that has its foundation in our tradition, in our being, in our life cycle. In the future libraries could be a soft and permanent tornado that collects all around itself and then sets free atoms, which meeting each other create positive and right molecules of experiences. Librarians have a role of partnership in society’s relations and they should be leaders in the progress of daily life.
5. If you have to explain to people in one sentence why they should come to the library and what they will find there, what would you say?
Discovery is fun: the library is truly open to improve your well-being, using ready resources.
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