Abstract:

21st century skills are embedded in the Malaysian school curriculum to prepare and produce knowledgeable and responsible young citizens in coping with the challenges of global knowledge economy. The trend has an impact on the roles of school resource centers (SRC), which are currently managed by the so-called library and media teachers (LMT), particularly in supporting the establishment of 21st century learning environment. As the LMTs are appointed among school teachers who need to allocate their responsibilities into academic teaching and SRC management, several issues are found from literature pertaining to their overburdened teaching tasks, lack of time and inadequate library management competencies. This has caused further shortcomings in service provision including poor implementation of information literacy and reading programs for school pupils. Therefore, this paper intended to propose a conceptual framework that drawn based on the ALA/AASL Standards for Initial Preparation of School Librarians (2010) to include five (5) areas of competencies to be investigated consisting of teaching for learning, information and knowledge, program management and administration, information literacy and reading promotion, and advocacy and leadership. This valuable framework is expected to be used for the study in next phase to identify the competency gap that exists within the limited capacity of the LMTs in playing their roles and also to reveal the needs for full-fledged information professionals for effective resource management, service provision and implementation of programs of the SRCs.