I thought this had already happened across the whole country!
Not sure you really need professional staff to help people use ICT on a
day-to-day basis, as long as they are there to manage the service and set
standards for the non-professional staff. A lot of the help people want is
pretty mundane stuff, e.g printer gone wrong. I think it would be a waste
of money and valuable skills to have professional staff dealing with that.
I've come across what are effectively call centres in some larger libraries,
where calls are answered in a 'back room'. I've never worked in one but it
seems like a good idea to me, if you've got the staff for what is a separate
service point. Afterall, far more enquiries are coming in now by telephone
and e-mail now, too.
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Bury Reference & Information Services
Alan Boughey, Reference & Information Services Librarian
Central Library, Manchester Road, Bury, Lancashire, BL9 0DG.
Tel. 0161 - 253 6047 Fax. 0161 - 253 5857
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask] [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 12 April 1999 11:34
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Cc: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: IT in Libraries - Arts Minister speaks
>
> My wife works for a home counties public library service whose latest
> review seems designed to remove pretty much all professionals from their
> libraries ("deprofessionalising the frontline service" its called), and
> replacing reference libraries with some sort of "call centre".
>
> IT is pretty useless without trained staff around to show people how to
> use
> it!
>
>
>
>
>
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