In relation to the future need for librarians working in schools, one respondent
observed that there was an urgent need for specially trained children’s and teen service
librarians. The respondent pointed out that this is a “core user group” and that there
was currently a “lack of courses for children’s librarians, teen librarians, and school
librarians in regard to their specialized programmes, services and collections”.
Regarding the future need to focus more on the requirements of the local, Arabic
speaking population, which was borne out by the high score for Arabic language
cataloguers, one respondent stressed that there was a definite need for “Arabic
speaking reference librarians”.
Finally, when comparing future job roles with the sector breakdown of libraries that
respondents work for (see Figure 3), it can be seen that the job roles that have been
selected as most needed are distributed fairly evenly across different library sectors
with a relatively even pattern emerging that is in direct proportion to the number of
respondents working across each different library sector.
Future library staffing requirements. Library managers and directors were asked
to predict how many positions and what type of positions they would probably need to
recruit for their libraries over the next five years. The overwhelming majority of
respondents (67 per cent) stated that they would need to recruit between one and
five positions. This was followed by those stating they would need to recruit between
six and ten positions (14 per cent). This again points towards the fact that most
libraries in Qatar are relatively small in nature when compared to libraries in many
other countries and that their development needs are fairly contained and specific.
The majority of respondents seeking to recruit between one to five staff over the next
five years work in academic or school libraries, whereas the majority of those seeking
to recruit between six to ten work staff work in hospital libraries or the Qatar National
Library, which is scheduled to open in 2015. This reflects the rapid expansion and
development of infrastructure across both of those areas within Qatar over the next
five-year timeframe.