Skills for reference staff

[Greg Lambert]

I have found that reference librarians feel as though they do not need
to have the "technical" aspects of a computer system.  Unfortunately,
this creates a situation where if they cannot handle the problems with
the computer, it is not their responsibility to analyse the problem, and
come up with a solution.  It is better to blame the system or the
computer systems personnel for the problem.  I am still amazed that I
have to tell the same reference librarian how to setup the general
preferences in Netscape to get a telnet session to work.  The
information is going more and more electronic, and if your going to try
to keep up, you need to know how to handle the tools.