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As a library assistant in his late 20s (and a trainee librarian), I find the most effective way of getting to grips with users with new gadgets is to go over and try and help them there and then. (Provided a basic level of IT training, like ECDL.) This happened, for instance, with a lad who wanted to copy music to his MP3 player from a (legal) download site. I'm not bothered about getting an MP3 player, and don't know much about them, but managed to learn quickly enough what we needed to do; repeating the process to show the user exactly what he needed to do by himself reinforced it in my mind, and I could manage it again. The only reason I am reasonably computer literate is because I worked in an office for a year or so, and had to use them day in, day out. Once the basic procedure has been learnt, it's all a matter of practice - and that's the same for doing a memo in Word, to finding the MySpace website for someone, to copying files to an unfamiliar application... Staff need to be encouraged to see computers as the jumped-up calculators they are (so they don't distrust/fear them so much), then be encouraged to realise that once they know the underlying principle of an operation (like copying a file) they can apply it wherever necessary, even in an initially unfamiliar situation. I notice regularly that some of my colleagues (who sometimes ask me to do the troubleshooting, "because I'm good with these things") are more than capable of understanding the problem and the solution when I tell them what I did afterwards...they just don't have enough confidence in their own abilities to go out there and try to help by themselves. (And they think I'm better than I am...!)