By Elizabeth Anne Hartman

According to a February report, “The Future of Work after Covid 19,” by management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the pandemic accelerated existing trends in remote work, e-commerce, and automation, with up to 25 percent more workers than previously estimated potentially needing to switch occupations. In a New York Times guest essay, Vicki Lau reported that “people are looking for true fulfillment in their lives and careers, and with e-commerce businesses easier to set up than ever, workers have become their own bosses and have even started their own enterprises.” The driver, she says, is technology. “Tech contributes to change by enabling work from anywhere.”

These shifts have forced public libraries to take a close look at their workforce development programs and make changes to meet the needs of a vastly changing employment and business landscape.  O’Reilly for Public Libraries [OPL], from O’Reilly Media available through ProQuest, Part of Clarivate, has become an increasingly important tool in this arena. Library Journal spoke with five librarians and a representative from ProQuest to learn how OPL enhances workforce development. 

The O’Reilly name has long been familiar to librarians because it is a trusted and reliable source that many of them used in their own MLIS degree programs or use to train their own staffs. Peg Knight, ProQuest’s senior product manager for partners and distributors, comments on its familiarity to librarians—many of whom “would recognize an O’Reilly cover immediately,” because of the strong branding, decades in the Tech space, and the familiar wood cut animals on the covers of many O’Reilly titles. One title in particular, Information Architecture, now in its fourth edition, is fondly known as “The Polar Bear Book.” But these books are just a small piece of the overall O’Reilly for Public Libraries platform, which offers 45,000 books from more than 200 publishers, and 30,000 hours of video along with learning paths and case studies.

Knight says that O’Reilly’s reputation stems from “serving up technology information for more than forty years and being on the cutting edge of technology.”  Over the decades, in addition to providing books on tech, O’Reilly has developed a network of experts and speakers, recording case studies that have “captured the knowledge and experience of key technologists in the industry,” she says. “Organically, O’Reilly has become a hub for technology information.”

Tech literacy is a key component in public libraries’ workforce development programs, which include a wide range of services and programs that are crucial tools for the betterment of communities—from rural farming towns and old industrial areas to suburban enclaves and concrete jungles. Knight explains that OPL has critical content to meet the wide-ranging needs of public libraries with specific content for programming languages like C++ and Python, Amazon Web Services, cyber security, data analysis and mining, artificial intelligence, and design, including books on Adobe’s family including Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop.  “It’s undeniable that technology has taken hold everywhere.  All businesses operate on tech; we all lean on it,” Knight adds.

O’Reilly knows that everyone learns differently – there is no one-size-fits-all model. So, the technology and content O’Reilly provides reflects this; if someone wants to learn Python, for example, they can learn using videos, books, case studies or learning paths.  Content is also divided into buckets of beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

O’Reilly also stands apart because it applies what it calls “O’Reilly Radar,” tracking need-to-know trends at the intersection of business and technology.

Alongside its vast technology sources, OPL also has content pertaining to entrepreneurship and general business and career advancement tools, including presentation skills, strategy and leadership, and resume writing. Also important to career advancement are its resources for technologists who have become managers. 

Mid-Continent Public Library in the greater Kansas City area is comprised of 32 branches serving broad rural, suburban, and urban communities across three counties. Morgan Perry, MCP’s Outreach Business Specialist, reports that research from the area’s Small Business Association shows that at any given time, 6% of their constituency (48,000 people) is thinking about opening a business. “They may not be taking action just yet, but they are looking for an opportunity, plan on taking a class, or are talking to their cousin or grandma about it,” Perry says.

For MPL, O’Reilly’s remote accessibility fits in perfectly with the library’s efforts to make workforce support available from anywhere.  It is particularly useful for the 50% of people that are referrals from other entrepreneurial support organizations who recommend books that they urge their clients to read, says Perry. “O’Reilly is a great source because it’s going to have that recommended read and it doesn’t matter how many people need or want to read it at the same time.”

She also notes that O’Reilly can fill the gap for people who don’t have social capital – most of the library’s target audience doesn’t know someone with a small business to ask for advice. The books that O’Reilly offers are invaluable for those who don’t come from a long line of business owners, who may or may not have gone to college or studied business, or who can’t drop everything to go take a class. OPL’s inventory includes entry level material accessible to anyone for today’s most wanted skills: data mining, writing code, and photoshop-becomes their lifeline, Perry says.

Keith Armour is the Education & Homework Support Manager in the Adult Learning Center for the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library and its 41 branches. While most of the branches are within the Cincinnati city limits, the library also serves the surrounding suburbs. The Adult Learning Center grew out of a downtown Cincinnati location that was home to an after-school homework help center. In 2010 the center opened in the mornings for adults providing job services and basic reading and math. Subsequently, the child population at the center diminished somewhat while the adult population increased which led to using the homework assistance model in the main library as well. In January of 2020, the full-service adult learning center was launched.         

Armour’s initiatives are part of the overall workforce development program at the library which is led by a committee comprised of members from his department and others.  “The goal,” he says “is to keep connecting with the community with virtual programming centered around resumes, interviews, and job skills.  A member of Armour’s team, Chelsea Gabotero, conducts workshops on twenty-first century job skills and finds O’Reilly an essential tool. She points to its variety of courses, learning paths, videos, and books and their ability to teach programming languages like Python, R, SQL, and C++ to users with different approaches to learning and different information needs.

While much of O’Reilly’s content is geared to those in technology and computer science fields, Gabotero believes it is also an excellent resource beyond those sectors.  Its content about cloud administrative services and cybersecurity has wide appeal, as do its study and exam guides for specialized fields such as nursing, its video tutorials on graphic design and photography, and its other programming to acquire certifications in a broad range of fields. She is thrilled that the library can offer these resources to anyone with a library card anywhere.               

Logan MacDonald is Director of Products & Technology for the seven branches of Anythink Libraries, that serve the nearly 500,000 people of the northern suburbs of Denver, CO. A recent strategic analysis by the library showed that within the workforce development-career-entrepreneurship stratagem, “reaching a good living where you live right now is something that’s really important to everyone in our community,” he says.    

O’Reilly provides resources to help patrons achieve this goal, particularly in the areas of licensing, vocational education, and technical and design skills.  Until recently, Anythink used O’Reilly only in IT as a professional resource. “Once we saw that it was available to libraries through ProQuest, the decision [to make it available to all library users] was really easy for us,” MacDonald says.  “We’ve never been able to offer the depth of technology and instructional resources that we want because we don’t have the shelf space or the money for a really neat collection of software or computer programming materials. O’Reilly is a great way for us to offer a ton of those things.”

Part of helping patrons meet this challenge is to expose them to different career options, especially for young people who don’t know what they want to do yet.  This approach doesn’t necessarily involve comprehensive training for a specific job. Instead, it means bringing in folks who can say, “here’s what a job in the hospitality, or petroleum, or biomedical field is like; here are the tools and skills you need,” says McDonald. Books and Resources such as AWS System Administration (O’Reilly: 2018) or Roblox Game Development in 24 Hours: The Official Roblox Guide (Pearson 2021) meet those needs head on.

The Adult Learning Center also provides the means to attain a secondary educational degree or certifications needed to get and succeed in jobs people want.  Anythink partners with other education literacy organizations and businesses in the region. One recent program had a professional drone photography company hold classes through the library to teach people how to fly drones and take photographs. Then the library helped the participants acquire the necessary license and requirements to fly a drone.  Here too, OPL offerings such as Drones to Go: A Crash Course for Scientists and Makers (Apress 2021) or Aerial Photography and Videography Using Drones (Peachpit Press 2015) are essential.

The Seattle Public Library serves the city’s population of approximately 740,000 through its main library and 26 branches. In 2020, SPL partnered with neighboring libraries and other organizations to form Your Next Job that is “specifically aimed at people with barriers to employment,” says Elisa Murray, the library’s digital communications strategist. 

The initiative was launched in direct response to the pandemic-related crisis, notes Marion Scichilone, assistant managing librarian.  “It is aimed at offering personalized, one-on-one help searching and applying for jobs; applying for unemployment; gaining technology skills and more,” she explains.  Post-pandemic, the plan is to continue it. “There has always been a need for reskilling and job support,” Scichilone adds, and in the wake of the pandemic more and more people are reevaluating their lives and jobs. She finds that O’Reilly covers the specific fields patrons want to get more experienced or savvy with or areas in which they want to earn a degree or certificate.  Among the popular areas are system administration, drones, gig Economy, and game Development.  She likes the curated content that she can share with patrons to move them from a beginner to expert. Like all online resources, usage went up during and since the pandemic. “As the O’Reilly catalog expanded beyond Safari’s pure technology titles, library patrons interested in professional development, career growth, and other business topics find O’Reilly very useful,” she says.

The Edmonton Public Library in Alberta, Canada serves about 1.4 million people through 21 branches. Since the pandemic, its workforce development programs went from mostly in-person to predominately virtual.

When EPL transferred in full to the O’Reilly platform from Safari Tech, Bethany Arsenault, digital discovery librarian, says that it was a “great transition for us.” She calls the platform “beautiful and modern,” saying that it takes the form of Ebooks and transcends that to something more dynamic. In particular, she cites the learning paths, case studies, and other aspects of the platform that ramp up workforce development by providing resources for a wide array of employment sectors for all knowledge levels. This means that when one of their outside consultants recommends a book or resource, O’Reilly will likely have it.

“Another really fantastic thing about O’Reilly and the content it provides,” says Arsenault, is that O’Reilly is continuously updated to ensure the most current and relevant technology and business content is available to users. O’Reilly also includes pre-publication “New Releases” in the resource, so users have access to current titles that are not even broadly available to the public yet.  “We want to make sure our resources are super up-to-date and timely.  It’s reassuring on my end to know that content will not become stagnant, that O’Reilly is on the ball and taking care of that.” 

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