Lean Library, a ‘Technology from SAGE’ company, is pleased to announce its partnership with Skilltype, a global training platform for librarians. Lean Library will utilize Skilltype’s innovative platform to curate and showcase its product training, events and webinars, providing librarians with recognition for the skills and knowledge acquired, whilst also enabling greater networking amongst Lean Library’s library partners. Lean Library and Skilltype will also develop a new community for Skilltype members, Librarian Futures, to share and solicit debate and ideas about the evolving role of the librarian. This will build on Lean Library’s 2021 global consultation, which culminated in its Librarian Futures report. 

The partnership will begin with the creation of a curated community feed, Librarian Futures, through which members can access articles, webinars and thought pieces relating to the future of the library, alongside sharing ideas and discussion with fellow librarians, which will help to further expand the conversation around the role of the librarian in the digital age. As with Lean Library’s Librarian Futures report, the feed will differentiate from other discourse on ‘the future of the library’ by focusing on what this means for librarians and their evolving roles and skills. 

Lean Library will also have a dedicated page for related training videos and learning sheets that will help to enhance librarian knowledge of Lean Library. This will include the ability for librarians to gain a record of completion which they can share with their library and also use to encourage sharing of expertise across libraries. Following the upcoming release of Lean Library’s Community Insights dashboard, Skilltype will act as a complementary platform to build relationships between existing Lean Library partners and the wider librarian community. 

Matt Hayes, Managing Director of Lean Library, commented “We are really excited by this partnership with Skilltype. It’s an opportunity for us to work more closely with an organization championing the library and the librarian, something we put at the heart of our mission and our product strategy. The Skilltype platform will also work brilliantly in disseminating our product training to librarians, whilst also recognising the deep knowledge and insights librarians have developed in Lean Library. We believe in closer collaboration between vendors and libraries and see Skillytype as a key ally in that.” 

Tony Zanders, CEO of Skilltype, added “Matt and his colleagues have a track record of challenging conventional wisdom of how patrons access resources, and should come as no surprise that they are rethinking information access for staff. Lean Library’s use of Skilltype with their user community establishes a new precedent for how vendors present the right training resource to the right library worker at the right time.” 

The “Librarian Futures” tag can be found on Skilltype now. Existing Lean Library Futures customers can find a direct link to Skilltype content on the Community Insights dashboard from 2nd May. 

 
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About Lean Library

Lean Library, a Technology from SAGE company, provides software solutions to the library community, bringing the power of the library into the patron’s workflow, wherever they may be. Its mission is to help redefine, enable and amplify the power of the academic library in order to advance student learning and researcher impact. Lean Library’s core solution is a browser extension which streamlines access to academic resources and content at the point of need. Over 100 libraries use this solution from universities all over the world including Harvard, NTU and Cambridge. 

About Skilltype 

Skilltype is a library software company specializing in using data to create modern talent management workflows. Libraries across six countries use Skilltype to provide personalized training for their employees, identify skill gaps, and make data-informed decisions on whether to recruit, reskill, or share expertise. Skilltype was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.