What do CD-ROM users really need?

Abstract

CD-ROM users are happy. But are they well served? There are hints in the literature that the CD-ROM heaven may be somewhat closer to purgatory than to paradise. Library administrators who, understandably enough, wish to be leaders in adopting new technology have assumed that can be reduced or held at the same level when such changes are made. As Zink notes, A persistent administrative malady is the assumption that technology will decrease, or at least not require additional, demands on staff time [5]. Other writers have observed that this is at best a delusion. Pope comments that patrons suffer from an inability to select or understand the nature of databases [6]. This author, in contrast to wishful administrative dreams, states that the use of CD-ROM in academic libraries has considerable implications for library staffing [7]. Bostian and Robbins see a fallacy in the idea that end users soon gain the ability to work by themselves without serious problems. They observe that students are likely to become overconfident in their skills [and] delight in teaching their friends all they know [8] (Figure 1).

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 — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.