The Required Competencies of Para-Professionals in Library Services of Sarawak State Libraries

Abstract

Para-professionals in the library services are library associates, library technicians, or library assistants who assist the professional librarians in library-related task. Mining the literature unveiled that study investigating the required competencies on para-professional are still very limited. To address this gap, this paper reports a study that was conducted with the purpose to identify the required competencies of para-professionals in the library services. Adopting the survey research methodology, data were collected using questionnaires from 502 para-professional librarians working with the Sarawak State Library in Sarawak, Malaysia. The findings suggest that all the seven sets of competencies, namely general competencies; agency and organizational knowledge; reference and research; collection management; content organization and structure and library technology management are either moderately or highly required by the para-professionals. Based on these findings, the appropriate training needs could be identified.