Introduction

• Welcome to librarianship
• Long history in librarianship and indexing
• New times means new opportunities and skills for all of you

What have we been doing?

• First online library catalogue in Australia
• Weapons Research Establishment, SA
• First collaborative purchase of a dataset loaded to a computer
• 1968 Chemical Abstracts CSIRO and Melbourne Universities

What about reference?

• Database access and searching skills emerged in the 1970s and 1980s
• Digital catalogues, e-resources and full text services emerged during the 1990s
• Next is the emergence of real services using collaborative reference software, knowledge bases and our networks

What does this mean for librarians & technicians?

• Clients value you!
• Broadbent & Lofgren study shows staff most critical success factor
• Smithsonian study confirmed this, critical role in taking scientists into the electronic environment

New services - new staff

• The bibliography is dead - new sites
• Federation
• PictureAustralia
• Collaborative reference - CDRS
• In your face reference

What do users expect?

• Interpreter
• Flexibility
• Consistency -
• mylibrary or
• myuser?
• Support

What this means for you

• Skills
• communication
• general core skills
• team work
• enthusiasm for change
• learning as a way of life

Wired men and women

• Expect to move and change
• Expect to be valued

Copyright
http://conferences.alia.org.au/alia2000/proceedings/roxanne.missingham2.html