Origin Story of the Professional Coaching Library
The founders identified a common need for a library of resources that will support our shared passion for stewardship of the profession and enable us and our colleagues to discover, learn, explore, and further the profession of coaching. We were aware of a majority of information that was previously inaccessible, either hidden behind private firewalls or otherwise not on the internet. In such an abundance-oriented profession, to see the documentation and research in such scarcity struck us as a profound contradiction. The library is our attempt to bring it all together and make it available to you.
On a local level coaching associations and schools have pulled together physical libraries of coaching books. These physical libraries tend to be limited because access to anything but life coaching books is hard to come by. The business and corporate research, journals, articles, resources, and books are often inaccessible or unavailable to the general public, despite being in abundance. The Professional Coaching Library is set to change all that.
The Professional Coaching Library can be traced back, as in the case of several other major coaching initiatives, to a two day meeting that is held every year in conjunction with the International Coaching Federation (ICF). Called “The Executive Coaching Summit” (ECS), this meeting has served as a forum for stewardship of the field, as well as for networking, professional development and colleagueship.
Stewardship was exhibited in the creation during the 2003 ECS of a new journal—the International Journal of Coaching in Organizations (IJCO)— that became a central venue for more than a decade for the reporting of research, theory and practices in the field of organizational coaching. Stewardship was also evident in creation during the 2004 ECS of a new institution—the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations (ICCO)—that provided diverse worldwide forums over eight years for distinctive conversations among those who provide, use, and study professional coaching practices within organizational settings.
Several of those who provided leadership in the creation of both IJCO and ICCO, made yet another commitment during the 2005 ECS: they committed to establishing a data base—a Professional Coaching Library (PCL), which later became the Library of Professional Coaching (LPC)—for those who provide, use and study organizational coaching practices.
In March, 2007 the first iteration of the LPC was launched online, thanks to the generous funding of initial donors, sponsors, and patrons who believed in the value of having an online vetted, trusted, curated resource like the Library of Professional Coaching.
Suzi Pomerantz: Thank you, Bill. I very much appreciate your kind comments and miss our visits!...