WebJunction wrap-up: 2024 highlights and top picks
We’re celebrating another year of learning, collaboration, and innovation with public library staff at the heart of everything we do. Throughout the year, we focused on our mission to provide free and practical professional development, foster vibrant peer learning, and support libraries in addressing today’s challenges. Whether you’re exploring our new offerings or revisiting community favorites, we hope these resources energize and inspire your work in 2025.
More than 26,000 library staff learners enrolled in WebJunction’s Course Catalog.
The WebJunction Course Catalog continued to provide free continuing education opportunities for library staff to engage in professional development. This included adding two new courses, refreshing several older courses, and making updates to the Course Catalog to enhance the user experience. We also announced a new IMLS-funded project to develop a new series of free online continuing education program for public library staff. Keep an eye out for the first courses in that series to launch later this year, and check out these new and refreshed courses:
- A Community-Centered Approach to Digital Collections – Learn approaches that have proven successful for other libraries, archives, and museums, and illuminates a path forward to build collections that center the voices of many different communities.
- Dealing with Difficult Situations – This course will teach you about some common challenges library staff face and how to deal with these situations calmly, respectfully, and effectively while focusing on your well-being, and that of your colleagues and patrons.
- Shelving with Dewey – Library staff, assistants, or volunteers can enroll in this course for a great introduction on how to shelve items by the Dewey Decimal Classification system.
And be sure to explore these popular courses, chosen by the WebJunction learning community:
- De-escalation Strategies for Libraries, Archives, and Museum Staff – This course will equip you with ways to de-escalate conflict while keeping library staff and users safe.
- From Burnout to Balance – Explore strategies to help manage stress, enhance emotional regulation, and build resilience.
- Supercharged Storytimes – You already provide great storytimes. Supercharge your practice to make them even better! Take this course to learn how to intentionally apply research-based practices to boost early literacy in young children attending library storytime.
More than 10,000 library staff came together to share and learn during 23 webinars.
WebJunction webinars bring library staff together to listen, learn, and exchange ideas with peers from across the US and beyond. Explore some of the most popular webinars of 2024, picked by you:
- Building authentic relationships with underserved communities – Learn how to develop a plan for identifying, reaching, and building relationships with underserved communities.
- Leadership strategies for building connection and defusing difficult situations – This webinar introduces skills and practical strategies for developing empathetic, curiosity-led leadership, to help improve communication, connection and cooperation at your library.
- Creating a person-centered library: Supporting patrons while avoiding burnout – This webinar reviews ideas and approaches for how libraries can support both high-needs patrons and staff.
- Libraries foster social connection: Responding to the epidemic of loneliness and isolation – Explore ways to intentionally design for social connection in library services and programs.
- Cultural humility in library work –Explore the benefits of incorporating cultural humility into library practice, whether through interpersonal interactions or to inform and improve policies and procedures.
We collaborated with dozens of partner groups, libraries, and real-world practitioners.
Partnerships help us expand access to learning so more library staff can connect, grow, and thrive. State library agencies, government agencies and private foundations who offer grants, and partner organizations all helped us to continue our work and increase its impact. Highlights from the past year include:
- Opioid Crisis Support Kit for Public Libraries – This resource helps support and strengthen libraries as they respond to the ongoing opioid crisis. Visit the project page to learn more and explore new articles about programs in libraries that have used the Support Kit.
- Building Resilient Communities – This project aims to enhance the collaborative efforts between public libraries and community-based organizations in addressing the pressing challenges posed by climate change and its associated social and health impacts.
- Empowering Informed Communities: Resources for building community trust around information – A new three-year project with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public focused on creating research-based resources and tools on information literacy and misinformation for library workers.
- Data for Good – This project, developed by the Providence Public Library, provides the curriculum and resources for libraries to train teens and adults in data analysis to help support nonprofits in their communities.
We shared more than 50 articles and resources about and for public libraries.
Every week we share library stories and interviews, program profiles, and resources to support the good work libraries are doing in communities. Here’s a selection of our most popular stories from the past year.
- Growing library garden programs – Explore resources for starting your own library garden or creating a gardening program.
- Helping libraries to be autism-ready – Discover strategies and resources for creating inclusive, accessible, learning-rich programs for autistic children and their families.
- Inclusive collections for Supercharged Storytimes – This collection of diverse booklists can inform your storytime choices to help to help ensure that the children who come to your storytimes experience a sense of belonging and broaden their worldview.
- Mental health resources for libraries – This collection of resources can inform and support both staff and patron well-being.
- Expanding collections with a Library of Things – Learn how to start a new lending library or explore ideas and inspiration to expand your library’s existing collection.
- Inspire creativity with library arts and crafts programs – Get creative with your library programming—check out this list of ten ways libraries can spark creativity and connection through engaging arts and crafts programs.
- Food for thought: Library kitchens and cooking programs – Read this article to learn how libraries are bringing joy, creativity, and community into their food and cooking literacy programs.
Additional highlights and guest contributors
We also launched a new topic area on sustainability for libraries, published the first in a new series of articles from WebJunction Director Andrew Harbison, and added new resources and learning pathfinders to help support your library learning goals.
And one of our favorite types of stories to share are the ones that come from you! Thank you to these contributors who shared their time and stories from the field with us this year:
- Rebekkah Smith Aldrich—Sustainable Libraries series: A resource collection to support libraries as they address the greatest threat to global health and the grandest challenge of our time: climate change.
- Dr. Audrey Barbakoff—Community engagement collection including Easy as ABCD: Using asset-based community development as a lens for authentic relationship-building
- Amy Phillips—Creating a community-led library: Loveland Public Library's u-lab initiative in action
- Noah Lenstra and Emily Orischak—Singing the unsung heroes who make libraries successful
- Susan Gregurek and Mary Johnson—Together we heal: Exploring mental health peer support at the library
- 2022-2024 ALSC Research Committee—Reading in the balance: Exploring the role of public library in the ‘science of reading’
We’re excited for what’s ahead in 2025—new courses, impactful projects, and more opportunities to connect and grow together. Thank you for being part of this journey. Here’s to another year of learning, collaboration, and library excellence!
Stay in touch with us via social media and Crossroads and visit the Course Catalog to explore nearly 400 self-paced learning opportunities to help you and your team meet your community's evolving needs.