Advancing Digital Empowerment
of Libraries in Europe

Launch of the ADELE project

Earlier this year, we kickstarted the Advancing Digital Empowerment of Libraries in Europe project, or ADELE for short. While we may not be a powerhouse vocalist like Adele, we’re a dedicated consortium of organisations from across Europe who want to help libraries navigate the digital transformation. It’s no secret that digital technologies and services play a big role in lives whether it is for work, personal life, or education. We also saw the pandemic greatly impact the education sector – both formal and non-formal alike. Yet with all these technological changes, how do educational institutes know that they are utilising technologies to the fullest to provide better services, develop new methods, boost lifelong learning, and make learning more user-friendly?

We set out the ADELE project to explore this question precisely and look at how libraries, and the non-formal education sector more broadly, be helped to assess their use of digital technologies. This is no easy feat to do which is why we brought together a consortium of partners from Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, and Ireland representing library networks, European organisations, and training organisations. Together we will be developing a web-based tool modelled from the European Commission’s SELFIE for schools tool. Much like the SELFIE tool, ours will help take a digital snapshot of a library’s use of digital technologies from the perspective of directors, library staff, and library users. 

The ADELE journey officially started when we met in Brussels for a four-day meeting where we dove into the areas and statements of the SELFIE tool and adapted them to the library sector. We debated over adding and removing areas and statements over the four-days which were also peppered with a meeting with the SELFIE tool technical team as well as a webinar with librarians interested in the project. Following on from that, we continued to review the statements internally and officially started recruiting librarians to the project. We’ll be doing some beta testing before releasing the final tool that will be used by our librarians and you!

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