O papel da educação continuada na formação profissional do bibliotecário de informação jurídica

Abstract

The study is about the continuing education of the librarian who works in legal institutions. The understanding that general education of librarians does not enable them to effectively meet the needs of legal professionals in their demands for legal information, combined with the lack of formal courses in Brazil that provide qualification to work in this area, as well as scarce literature on the practice of law librarians motivated this study. The lack of training aimed at developing specialized skills in legal information is considered in the literature related to the topic and needs to be highlighted, considering that spaces of dialogue in which the subject is discussed don’t have an adequate systematization to achieve this purpose. In discribing that reality, the research has the following question: how shall occur the continuing education process of the librarian who works in legal institutions? To answer this question, a general objective was designed: to know the process of continuing education of librarians who work in legal institutions. The specific objectives consist of: to describe the professional profile that is demanded for librarians who work with legal information; to verify the difficulties of librarians to search, process, use and disseminate legal information; to investigate the continuing education actions developed by librarians to work in law libraries; to identify the perspectives and challenges for the professional performance of librarians of legal institutions, facing the technological paradigms of the information society. To answer the question and achieve the objectives, the methodology of the present investigation assumes a qualitative, descriptive and exploratory genre, whose population is the law librarians of the city of Salvador. The sample made a total of 10 participants which were divided into two subgroups according to the respondents' working environment: group 1 - librarians linked to higher education institutions and group 2 - those who work in institutions whose legal practice provides informational support to legal operators. The results showed that: a) professional profile mostly belongs to the female gender, with consolidated experience in working in the legal area, age group above 40 years old and postgraduation; b) the most expressive difficulties in the work exercise are linked to the lack of mastery of legal terminology, the lack of autonomy in decisions in the institutional scope; c) continuing education actions are linked to own initiatives in the search for new knowledge, that is, courses, events and discussion lists and/or institutional incentives; d) perspectives that were presented are related to the massive use of ICT in the information environment to optimize the services provided, while the challenges are financial, human resources, infrastructure and technology. It is concluded that most of these professionals acquire knowledge and skills about Legal Librarianship in an autodidact way and in exercising the profession, due to the absence of formal tools that would enable them to work in legal institutions. Investments in librarianship training institutions are necessary in order to provide training for librarians who work or wish to work in different areas of knowledge, especially those devoted to legal librarianship.