LINQing librarians for better practice: using slack to facilitate professional learning and development

ABSTRACT

Public librarians face various factors that can affect professional practice: socio-cultural nuances of diverse information needs, isolation due to system-wide location and/or geography, and systemic disconnection from professional networking and learning opportunities. To address these factors, an inquiry-based professional development model called The Librarians’ Inquiry Forum (LINQ) was devised and employed with a select group of Hawai’i-based public librarians via the cloud-based collaborative workspace platform, Slack, as a means of building a community-of-practice for professional learning and development. This article reports the evolution and early implementation of the LINQ model. Inquiry-based research often reveals data that raises more questions than answers. Questions raised from the reflective research performed with LINQ revealed ways in which the LINQ librarians learned “better” ways/approaches of practice. LINQ was found to be a viable method for enhancing public librarian professional development.