Celebrating National Library Week 2021
by Liana Volpe and Stephanie Holcomb
In celebration of National Library Week, we wanted to take the opportunity to highlight the great things libraries do for their communities and acknowledge the many hats that librarians wear in providing services to those in need of assistance. Over the past few years, we have worked closely with library staff across the United States to learn more about the role of libraries in workforce development services, and what the field can learn from their approach. Libraries are community-based institutions of trust, making them ideally suited to understand the evolving needs of community members during these challenging times.
In 2018, the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University published Public Libraries: A Community’s Connection for Career Services, highlighting the extent to which libraries were delivering a variety of workforce services and the predicted rise in demand for such assistance moving forward. Today, with the circumstances of job search fundamentally changed and 4 out of 10 unemployed individuals now long-term unemployed, this ongoing need has been exacerbated.
As a way to rethink service delivery at this time, Heldrich Center researchers released Building Communities of Care in Workforce Development Programs, which used lessons learned from the public libraries as a model for more holistic customer interaction and service provision. Libraries are a natural model of communities of care, so the public workforce system could derive lessons from this service mentality that work to address the needs of the whole person.
As the need to operate in a virtual setting continued, Heldrich Center researchers released A Review of New Jersey Public Libraries’ Virtual Services, taking a closer look at how libraries have adapted their services throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Significant adaptations to continue to serve their communities were observed, thus highlighting the agility and customer-centered focus of libraries’ inherent culture and the extensive network of hardworking librarians fielding patrons’ concerns at this time.
Libraries are unique institutions that embody customer- and community-oriented mentalities of service. As such, libraries will be pivotal in the road to economic recovery ahead. We celebrate libraries during National Library Week and look forward to our continued work in this area.
Liana Volpe and Stephanie Holcomb are Research Project Coordinators at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.
