Helpful Resources for TAFE and Online Library Support Groups 🆘

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💡 Are you a fellow TAFE student studying about Libraries or related topics?

Compiled here is an assortment of helpful resources that may prove useful to students who are studying about Library services at TAFE (or other training organisations), or even anyone with an interest about the realm of libraries.

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Other than the books stocked at campus libraries and associated subject guides, I find that TAFE doesn’t place anywhere near as much of an emphasis on on making learning material publicly-available as universities do.

Along with publications in journal articles (’publish or perish!’), universities often upload material such as lecture slides and videos, tutorial handouts, reading lists and textbook excerpts, and plenty of practice quizzes/exams onto the internet for the public or students from other universities to freely access. LibreTexts is a prominent example of this, and so are many university webpages (which have URLs that end in .edu). I often relied on these during my Science degree when studying for exams, assignments, and out of general interest; they were of incredible benefit.

In contrast, the TAFE Library courses (ironically) don’t even have publicly available reading lists (the Libguide/subject guide webpage comes close but does not contain prescribed or recommended texts for enrolled students), let alone any valuable practice material beyond the institution-only ‘workbooks’ 😠.

Even the TAFE course webpages for the ‘Cert IV/Diploma of Library and Information Services’ only list unit names/codes and a bunch of economic/labour data (such as full time share, % female, average full-time hours, median weekly pay, industry prospectus, etc.) rather than anything related to library science concepts or what may be involved in the courses’ assessments. Instead, a student would need to check an entirely different website, Training.gov, in order to find out what the units actually involve and what workplace skills will be cultivated (see the Cert IV’s Lib Info Serv’s Training.gov webpage and the Diploma’s Training.gov webpage).

^The TAFE course description webpage for the Diploma of Library and Information Services. Although the units of the course are listed with their names and unit codes, they are not clickable and do not lead to any webpages that provide additional information about what each unit actually involves.

In other words, it is a dead end for any action other than enrolling in the course… a mere marketing tool 💰💵.

^The actual official national training register is a website called Training.gov, which is a database that contains official course descriptions and paperwork (legal documentation, I guess) 🗃️, along with lists of units that link to more webpages which contain information about each unit (like the learning guide or course outline for a subject at university) .

None of the teachers or staff members at TAFE told me (or the other library course students) about Training.gov; I had to locate it on my own via google 😠

Training Gov BSBINS505.jpg

^The unit details of BSBINS505 on Training.gov. Notice that this official listing goes into more detail that what the TAFE website provides by mentioning some specific aspects such as subject headings and classification numbers (but still fails to specify the Library of Congress Subject Headings and the Dewey Decimal System).

Scrolling lower on the webpage will show details about performance and knowledge evidence that will be assessed in the unit’s assignments.