In Slovenia, there are two types of education for public librarians: formal education and different forms of non-formal education.
Formal education programmes
The Department of Library and Information Science and Book Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, is the formal education provider. It develops the skills and knowledge for working in all types of organisations involved in creating, editing, publishing, collecting, preserving and providing access to recorded knowledge in a variety of media. Graduates are employed in libraries, information centres, publishing houses and similar organizations where the knowledge of information organisation is required.
The Department offers:
- First Cycle study programmes Librarianship and Information Science– single and combined courses
- Second Cycle study programmes Library, Information and Publishing Studies– single and combined courses
Within the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Study Programme in Humanities and Social Sciences, which represents the third cycle of the Bologna cycle, the Department implements the Information Sciences programme. The aim of the programme is to develop highly qualified research scientists and educators to conduct internationally comparable research on current theoretical and practical problems in the field of information sciences.
Continuing Professional Development
Continuing professional development is provided by the National and University Library (NUL), IZUM, the Institute of Information Science and the Ljubljana City Library (LCL).
As part of its national function, NUL develops and delivers continuing professional development courses, which are organised by the Library System Development, Consulting and Professional Training Department. The training content is aimed at beginner level participants, librarians wishing to improve their skills and those wishing to be trained in the national library information system with shared cataloguing.
IZUM’s training programme offers the courses for librarians who participate in the COBIB union bibliographic/catalogue database and who build the COBIB.SI and local databases.
Shared cataloguing training is provided by NUL and IZUM, and their courses are complementary.
Within the LCL, the Learning Centre provides continuing professional development for staff and librarians from across Slovenia. It organises training courses in different professional fields relevant to effective and high-quality work in the library. In cooperation with external providers, it prepares training courses tailored to the needs of Slovenian public libraries. It is recognised as a training centre for the skills required for the specific tasks of regional libraries.
In the Slovenian Library Association (SLA), some of the regional library associations dedicate their regular meetings to informal education of librarians. Its sections’ conferences also support informal education with selected topics.