Goals Of The Certification Program

Montana State Library established six goals for the certification program:

Promote continuing education and its impact for quality library services

Bring the Montana Library Certification Program into line with more recent competencies and certification programs such as Western Council and ALA

Improve recognition for librarians who participate and libraries that encourage staff to continue learning by:

  1. Improving how certified librarians are recognized
  2. Differentiating between minimum and extraordinary efforts
  3. Making the program certificate a useful tool for hiring and promotion
  • Develop a track for public library directors that:
  1. Requires continuing education for all public library directors
  2. Is more meaningful for what they need to know

Develop a voluntary track for trustees and/or library boards

Clarify ambiguous sections of the program

In addition to the original goals, two others were added by the Focus Group during the update process:

Develop a new tracking system that replaces continuing education forms requiring presenter signatures

Ask library administrators to be more involved with continuing education needs of staff and with verifying participation in training activities to achieve certification