Library Skills Workshops for Support Personnel.

Abstract

For two years the University of Maine at Orono Libraries have successfully ex perimented with Library Skills Workshops expressly designed for faculty secretaries, executive secretaries, administrative assis tants, and clerk-typists. While such groups are not generally considered a primary target of the bibliographic instruction movement, they constitute an important and often neglected audience and can easily be integrated into any comprehen sive program of library instruction. Build ing upon ideas pioneered at Sangamon State University in Springfield, Illinois, the Reference Department of Fogler Li brary offered its first workshop in Janu ary 1978. The session was so well received that it was repeated in March 1978 and again in March 1979.* It was recognized that in the rush to reach the more visible and more numer ous students and the more prestigious faculty, a fundamental constituent of the academic community was being over looked. Faculty secretaries, administrative assistants, and their associates are fre quendy called upon to locate or pick up materials in the library, compile reserve lists, make photocopies, order titles not believed to be on hand, and find the an swers to a wide variety of questions. These people are often left to their own resources when running such errands. As custodians of office records, clerical per sonnel can be in a critical position when files are purged and papers are dis carded, carried home, or transferred to the institution's archives. Librarians pro moting such services as bibliographic in struction and computer literature search ing or just trying to improve relations with the faculty and administration often find secretaries helpful in gaining entree. A standard format has been devised for

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.