Staff Training in the Automated Library Environment: A Symposium

As libraries increasingly automate and provide external access to their resources, a continual and growing need emerges for training of staff who implement, employ, and support these systems, and, in turn, train end‐users to exploit their new capabilities. The objectives and training techniques that have been adopted by individual institutions and technology providers vary, some being broadly structured toward educating staff members to function in the emerging electronic (virtual) library environment, some being more narrowly structured to facilitate adaptation and use of a specific new system that is being implemented. This symposium expresses the diverse training needs, experiences, and practices adopted by individual libraries, by consortia comprising a large number of libraries, by technology vendors striving to serve their library customers, and by academic computing services that share strategic responsibility for implementing online access to library resources.