Mapping the Landscapes

The Mapping the Landscapes nationwide survey allowed deep exploration into what those working in libraries, archives, and museums define as critical competencies for their day-to-day work. Respondents selected up to three high-level competency areas that were critical to their jobs, and then rated their confidence levels on specific competencies in each area.

The resulting data was coded to develop heatmaps for professional development planners to spot where respondents felt a minor or significant need for training around a given topic. All competencies had some level of significant need within the responding libraries, archives, and museums populations:

• Greatest Competency Needs by Sector, published 17 January 2017

Triangulating the need for, supply of, and demand of continuing education and professional development offerings is a challenging feat. Yet, professional associations, higher and continuing education programs, and others all find value in this information when planning, developing, and scheduling offerings.

Effective, efficient organizations meet their missions through individuals who wield robust skill-sets around organizational and project management, leadership, community engagement, collaboration, cross-cultural communication and so on. These skills, required by all effective organizations and businesses, highlight competency areas where training providers have fertile ground for collaboration.

The Mapping the Landscapes project team, funded by Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and facilitated by Educopia, aimed to explore this landscape of shared professional development needs. This compendium presents the full set of Mapping the Landscapes project findings, data, and data collection instruments, for professionals across all fields to leverage alongside the project’s state and field specific Tableau Public data visualizations.

• Self-Identified Library, Archives, and Museum Professional Development Needs 2016 Edition, published 16 December 2016

Data visualization dashboards extend the potential insight for users far beyond that of static graphics.

This brief guide identifies the basic toolset with which a user can “drill down,” asking questions and discovering important underlying patterns in the data.

• Storyboard Data Visualization Users Guide (created in collaboration with TrueBearing), published 07 July 2016

The “Mapping the Landscapes” Focus Group project, an initiative of the Coalition to Advance Learning in Archives, Libraries, and Museums, collected data from the cultural heritage field on continuing education and professional development (CE/PD) needs between August 2015 and June 2016.

The project was funded through a federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and managed by the not-for-profit Educopia Institute. Consultants from lyrasis facilitated four focus groups at major cultural heritage conferences (Society of American Archivists, American Association for State and Local History, American Library Association, and the American Alliance of Museums) and two online/virtual focus groups, with a total of 61 participants.

Research focused on resources used for CE/PD (“providers” of workshops and courses), course topics recently taken and desired for the future, skills development, selection factors for CE/PD, and collaboration and cross-sector training trends.

Participants in the six focus groups were found to be active consumers of cultural heritage CE/PD. They identified 191 CE/PD providers, and described 142 training sessions they had taken in the past year. They are interested in future training on a wide variety of subjects ranging from grant writing to advocacy, leadership, digital preservation and copyright. These desired classes aligned with the technical and management skills the focus group participants wanted to develop. While participants listed a wide variety of reasons for selecting specific classes, cost, geographic location, timing, and duration of training were leading factors in selection.

The majority of focus group participants had previously taken part in collaborative projects with institutions and individuals across the cultural heritage sectors, and saw many advantages and some barriers to these types of activities. While not as many had taken part in cross-sector training, they saw many advantages to doing so, and believed it would be beneficial on a personal level and to their organization. The focus group participants outlined some key topics they felt would be beneficial if
offered across cultural heritage sectors.

Future researchers who may want to replicate the focus group study should concentrate on reaching the major fields in the cultural heritage community (archives, libraries, museums, and historical societies), and also the subfields within each discipline.

• Focus Group Final Report, published 25 July 2016

The Mapping the Landscape needs assessment in continuing education and professional development offers a broad and statistically reliable overview of current perceptions, needs, assets and barriers, levels of competency and confidence across and within archives, library, and museum professions in the United States:

• Continuing Education/Professional Development Needs Assessment Survey, published 05 June 2016

Based on a comprehensive conceptual model, the Mapping survey data offers three valuable forms of information:

• Descriptive and comparative information regarding professional development and competencies across the three sectors, framed within a carefully constructed taxonomy to promote clear communication across professional cultures.
• Actionable data to promote evidence-based policy and program decision making in continuing education and professional development, including cross-sector collaboration in CE/PD program and curriculum development.
• A robust database to serve as a baseline for future inquiry in this area, along with foundational research methodologies.

This publication aims to introduce guiding principles and practices for CE/PD needs assessments from beyond the library, archives, and museum (LAM) sphere of reference.

A literature review section highlights needs assessment research from other fields (e.g., higher education, nonprofit training, etc.), drawing attention to models that could inform LAM practice. Existing LAM CE/PD needs assessment efforts are then contextualized against these models to inform future cross-sector CE/PD collaborations:

• LAM Education Needs Assessments: Bridging the Gaps, published 04 November 2015

Museums, archives, and libraries serve as knowledge conduits for their constituent communities. A core focus for each of these three fields is organizing and adeptly connecting users with content, often in service to the public good. This mission alignment positions organizations in these fields to collaborate. Federal funding agencies, such as the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), even directly recommend that organizations pursue such alliances to cross-germinate, achieve efficiencies of scale, leverage limited resources, and better serve their user communities.

While museum, archives, and library missions may be aligned, there is a wide variance across these fields (and their myriad sub-fields) in other aspects, including organizational sizes and governance structures, staffing and funding, acronyms and vocabularies, disciplinary specialties and user communities served. These factors may create real or perceived boundaries to cross-field collaboration. Each of these three fields has its own sense of libraries, archives, and museums operate largely within the bounds presented by these field (and sub-field) identities.

This brief will examine the perceptions and perspectives that make cross-field collaboration difficult for archives, libraries, and museums. It is not meant to illuminate the “real truth” about the similarities or differences between these three fields. Instead, it aspires to shed light on some of the issues that currently hinder our boundary-spanning potential, so that together we can mindfully observe and manage these issues as we develop collaborations between our archives, libraries and museums:

• Spanning Our Field Boundaries: Mindfully Managing LAM Collaborations, published 06 October 2015