This post is part of a series designed to further discussion of the PLA Results service responses, designed in 1998 to describe “what a library does for, or offers to, the public in an effort to meet a set of well-defined community needs.”
The bulleted comments below were gathered in conference sessions by the PLA Results team, in an effort to update the current service responses, which were originally written almost ten years ago. The PLA Results group is looking to the community for feedback on how to update these service responses to better reflect current public library methods and standards.
“A library that offers Business & Career Information service addresses a need for information related to business, careers, work, entrepreneurship, personal finances, and obtaining employment.” (definition care of the PLA Results site). The current version of the Business & Career Information service response, is available for review on the PLA Results web site (the file is an Adobe .pdf file, and requires Adobe Reader to view).
Share your feedback on the current Business & Career Information service response, as well as the starter comments listed below, by leaving a comment on this post page. You can help PLA Results bring public library service responses into the 21st century!
Business & Career Information Discussion Group Comments
Should this service response be renamed?
- We should call it Business and Career Services instead of Information
- The service response should be called Economic Development
Go back to the Service Response Discussion Index.
There are 4 Comments to "Service Response Discussion: Business & Career Information"
In my library, this service falls into two distinct camps. The Business Services patrons usually come in with a clearly defined need for a particular set of information. Assembling that information may be a challenge to the library staff, but there is little call to guide the patron to an understanding of what the information signifies.
Patrons who are seeking career information are often uncertain about what they are doing. In my experience, these are people who have been out of the job market for a while and don’t know how to incorporate online avenues or digital techniques into their job search. When I assist career info patrons, it involves teaching and guidance, as well as the delivery of actually of information.
So, there are two skill sets at work here. It may be time to consider divorcing business information service from career information service.
I don’t see Careers and Business as aligned at all. Careers seems to be more of a lifelong learning sort of thing and includes more than just the ability to explore career options, but includes using technology to look and apply for jobs. I’m also not sure about the word “Career.” So many of the people we see are entry level service workers who struggle to fill out online applications. When I think of a career, I don’t think of “stock boy at WalMart” or day labor or burger flipper. Employment Support?
[...] Business and Career Information (2 comments) [...]
These two topics serve two different groups. Patrons who are looking for career information are often students, and sometimes displaced workers looking for employment. Business has a connotation of financial information or information about corporations or investigation into business plans, grants, etc. It would make sense to divide this into two separate focus groups.