On January 25, 2010, ALA-APA began accepting applications from potential candidates interested in achieving the Library Support Staff Certification (LSSC). The LSSC Program is the first national, voluntary certification program for library support staff. This new certification program–the first national, voluntary certification program for library support staff–will help library support staff achieve recognition for current and new skills and abilities and increase access to continuing education opportunities.

The LSSC is open to any library support staff person with a high-school diploma or its equivalent and the equivalent of at least one year of full-time experience in a library with the last five years. Applicants do not have to be a member of ALA.  The application fee is $325 for ALA members and $350 for non-ALA members.

A certification program was sought for many years by library support staff.  In 2003, the ALA Congress on Professional Education III asked ALA to study LSS certification, ALA responded by including planning for a certification program in ALA’s strategic plan, ALA2010.  Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, ALA developed the LSSC over the past three years.

More information about the LSSCP is available online at http://www.ala-apa.org/lssc.

For a director to see what and how many CE activities their staff has attended, they can run an L2 attendance report for the library. This report provides total number of staff participating in LCLS CE events, total number of LCLS CE events attended by those participating staff, the total number of registrations for the LCLS CE events, and the library’s total number of CE contact hours for LCLS CE events.

To run the report, the director needs to sign into LibraryLearning (L2). Go into your personal L2 Profile by clicking on your name at the top right of the screen.

Click on ‘My Events’ listed on the left side of the screen. The events the director is registered to attend will display. Next, click on ‘Library Registrations’ listed in the brown/beige box on the right side of the screen. A short report will display, totaling attendance for a three month period. Change the dates to match the applicable reporting time dates, usually the library’s fiscal year.

Click on ‘Go’ to have L2 calculate the library’s totals for the selected time frame. It will take a minute or so to calculate the library’s total CE numbers. To give an idea of the report, these are the CE totals for LCLS using the dates 1 July 2008 to 15 May 2009.

Totals

• Total Staff Participating: 52 (this means 52 different LCLS staff members attended a CE event in the selected time frame. Please note, LCLS board members are included in this number)
• Total Events Attended: 148 (this is how many different events LCLS staff/board members attended)
• Total Registrations: 954 (this is the actual number of registrations LCLS staff/board members made)
• Total Contact Hours: 2089 (this is number of events attended multiplied by the number of contact hours each event actually lasted)

By scrolling through the report, the director can see which staff member attended which CE event.