Educational Needs of Iranian Rural Librarians: An Exploratory Study

In the present article, the educational needs of Iranian rural librarians are investigated. The rural libraries are the only cultural centers of rural communities, and the librarians of these libraries have limited contact with other librarians as well as professional communities. On the other hand, the rural library is one of the few institutions that try to reduce the gap in taking advantage of job opportunities and education in first-class universities and therefore has a moral duty. The trained rural librarian can play an important role in benefiting villagers with the opportunity of both university education and employment. For this reason, educating rural librarians is of great importance in rural development and benefits villagers through social opportunities. For this purpose, first, an attempt was made to extract and categorize the educational needs of rural librarians through interviews with them. Then, another attempt was made to extract and categorize the educational themes of rural librarians by reviewing international literature in the field of rural libraries. A total of 33 educational themes were obtained from interviews, and 36 themes were extracted from reviewing the literature. Finally, using a questionnaire, librarians were asked to prioritize these 69 educational themes and rank them between 1 and 20, where a score of 1 indicated the highest priority and a score of 20 showed the lowest priority. The findings showed that 10 educational themes are of priority for Iranian rural librarians: (1) child psychology, (2) puppet games and handicraft skills, (3) knowledge of children's and adolescent literature, (4) mentoring and educational guidance, (5) digital literacy, (6) information search and retrieval, (7) content production soft skills, (8) family counseling skills, (9) conflict management skills, and (10) life skills.