Developments in European information issues: Networks and relays – Services – Products, December 1998

Training

ASLIB, appointed a National Awareness Partners under the IMPACT II programme, and the European Information Association have for many years run awareness training courses in EU electronic information sources. However, hands-on training, when using such complex search languages as Mistral, is an essential prerequisite for obtaining successful results. Eurobases offered courses in Brussels while ECHO ran training sessions in different Member States. In the 1990s in the UK, the Association of EDC Librarians, predecessor to the European Information Association, organised training courses primarily for its members but also for other interested participants, while EDIT based in Coventry (with former column writers Antony Inglis and Keith Goodall) ran ECHO courses. Eurobases decided to devolve training from 1993 to a national level and the EIA and EDIT together with Admiral Training won the contract to provide that service. With the web interfaces the need for training is less immediately obvious but is still there, even if it focuses now more on the content and background, which sources to use when, and how to get the best results out of the databases.