Professional Development
Please check with your supervisor in advance for authorization if you plan to use work time to complete or participate in any training. Policies, available opportunities, and budgets for paid time for continuing education vary across the region.
Skills Building
Library Marketing 101 - This one-hour webinar will introduce learners to library marketing terminology and concepts. Mark Aaron Polger will introduce beginners to creating a marketing plan, conducting research on your users' needs and wants, and making data-driven marketing decisions. You will need to register for a free account with Niche Academy.
Budgeting for Libraries - Managing a library’s budget can be one of the most stressful parts of an administrator’s role. In this self-paced tutorial, we’ll walk through a year of your budget and provide information to help you better understand your income and track your expenses. Learn ways to make financial reporting a breeze, and build budgets—and relationships—with your community stakeholders and the patrons you serve. This 4-part tutorial will help you understand the basics of building and tracking a budget, focus on budget tracking and balancing, collect data for better reporting, and build budgets to best support your community’s needs. The course is self-paced and available as soon as you register. The course fee is $100 and is eligible for a TdS professional development scholarship.
Community Centered Planning - Whether you’re creating a new library program, revising the services offered at your library, reinventing staff organizational structure, or writing your library’s strategic plan, you benefit from a concise data-driven plan that explains your vision. This practical series of three tutorials allows you to move at your own pace through the planning process with an emphasis on qualitative data, quantitative data, and the elements of a one-page plan. You will have access to the tutorials for one year after registration. The course is self-paced and available as soon as you register. The course fee is $200 and is eligible for a TdS professional development scholarship.
Ohio Reference Excellence Online - Six self-paced training modules that cover many aspects of the reference process. If you’re new to library reference, you can work through all of the modules in order or you can jump to the modules you need as a refresher. The training is free and includes quizzes and a certificate of completion.
Level Up! provides continuing education opportunities. Are you hosting an event that is open to all? Submit it to the calendar here. TdS can provide your institution with scholarship dollars to defray your costs.
Media Landscapes: 23 Things is a self-paced professional development activity developed by Minnesota's Multitype Library Systems. It will help you:
Understand how people navigate the media and information landscape, and how forces within that landscape influence their navigation.
Learn how to build reflection and intentionality into information consumption.
Gain strategies for working with your community on intentional approaches to information consumption.
Reward a member library immediately with your effort!
TdS member library staff that complete "Things" earn actual cash for a TdS member library of their choice that can be spent on new materials, programming, whatever! This opportunity has limited funding, and it is first-come, first-benefits.
We'll count up your Things and send the library an honorarium in your honor! Do one Thing or all 23. Do them in order, or mix it up. Spend the amount of time and effort on the Things that feels right to you. This is learning for you, you are free to customize it as you see fit.
Click for the list of member libraries
Fill out the correct form below.