Affiliations: Search Services, Engineering Societies Library, 345 East 47th Street, New York, NY 10017, USA
Note: [*] Presented at the American Society for Information Science, Metropolitan New York Chapter Meeting, New York City, 23 November 1982, and at the Spring ASIDIC Meeting, Charleston, South Carolina, 21 March 1983. A version of this paper appears also in Library Hi Tech (Ann Arbor: Pierian Press) vol. 1 no. 1, Summer 1983.
Abstract: There is an industry: online. It is young and growing, confusing and undisciplined. There are people: searchers. They come from all sorts of backgrounds with all sorts of talents and shortcomings. There is a skill: online searching. Someone has to train these diverse people in this confusing industry which uses awesome tools and strange vocabulary. Library schools should accept online searching as a fully legitimate tool of librarianship and should incorporate into the curriculum a program which covers the theory of searching as well as an educational background to searching. Then students should be permitted to play, to experiment with the terminal without deadlines or fees, using a software program of individualized, programmed instruction on a microcomputer. After the student has become thoroughly comfortable with the system, then and only then should he be permitted to actually logon to a real system.
