ALA-APA Support Staff Certification

As I put pen to paper to write this column (yes sometimes the ideas still start that way for me), the ghosts and goblins are at the door. Perhaps that's not such a strange metaphor for this column because the idea of support staff certification is one that, like Halloween ghosts, has visited the American Library Association (ALA) in the past, only to disappear from view again and again. ALA has been discussing a certification program for library support staff for more than twenty years. BACKGROUND AND HISTORY OF ALA INVOLVEMENT IN CERTIFICATION In 1991, in Issue Paper #1--the first of ten issue papers reporting on the World Book-ALA Goal Award Project on Library Support Staff (LSS)--Kathleen Weibel wrote that, "Certification of library paraprofessionals or support staff has been proposed as a means of recognizing those who have attained a certain level of knowledge or skill." (1) Throughout Weibel's issue papers and in much of the literature on support staff certification that follows, there is a focus on certification for support staff that seems to hinge on the issue of certification as achievement-based, and not on the advantage libraries could gain from certification that is patron or service based. What do users gain when support staff are well trained? Why certification? How to accomplish it? Competency statements for librarians are one way of measuring performance against a set standard, but development of those competencies is a complicated issue. The literature reveals that while there are examples of competency documents, little has been written about the process of developing a competencies document. Competency documents completed following Weibel's issue papers were really a blend of existing standards and local practices that could be adapted to other libraries and not competency based. From 1985-1989 I served as a member of the State Library of Iowa--Continuing Education Certification Advisory Committee--that outlined the path for certification of public librarians for the State of Iowa. (2) This advisory committee worked with Debra Wilcox Johnson, who was then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to develop a program of certification for public librarians that has been continually adapted and is still in use today. (3) In 2001, the Iowa State Library began the process of identifying competencies for both support staff and professional staff, beginning with collection development competencies for bibliographers and followed by competencies for reference. In 2001, a committee of four began the task of developing competency statements for the bibliographers at Iowa State University (ISU). These competencies were then used in a variety of ways: to serve as guidelines for training new librarians, to serve as yardsticks to measure the progress of continuing librarians, and to direct the need for additional training and guidance of individual bibliographer growth. (4) After the collection development competencies were completed, competencies for reference professional staff were constructed. Following this I developed competencies for use with reference support staff. The State of Iowa and ISU are not alone in their attempts at developing certification or competencies. Two RUSA members have been selected; I will serve with Jeannie Alexander from the Bucks County Free Library in Pennsylvania, as members of the ALA Support Staff Certification Project Task Force that will serve as an advisory board to study support staff certification as a national issue. ALA created the task force to develop competencies for support staff that can be used in all types of libraries so that the ALA-Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) can best serve library users at all levels in all types of libraries. For those of you who feel that training for support staff somehow devalues your MLS, I would say that developing competencies is not about a degree but about service to our users. …