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Training end users in the mining world

Katinka van Straaten, ATD Techno-Link 

As a result of restructuring at Anglo’s Corporate Head Office in Johannesburg in 2001 the then “Information Centre” got a new mandate, which was to provide an information service to the technical disciplines only. This is when the name changed to Tech-Know Link to reflect the new mandate. The non-technical disciplines and services were stopped and functions such as cataloguing and indexing were outsourced.  Another result of the restructuring was that the staff numbers were reduced from 13 to the current 3 permanent staff members.  This reduction of staff necessitated a move to online information sources and the training of end-users to utilise these sources effectively. Apart from training clients at Head Office, we also had to find a way to satisfy the needs of our many overseas clients sitting at operations as far away as China and Australia. Our business model changed from “we do it all for you” to “we make information available so that you can help yourself”. My paper will cover the different methods we used to train and mention the advantages and disadvantages of the different methods. I will describe how we went about establishing our expertise in searching. I will also discuss the battle between public domain Search Engines and Commercial Databases and how we went about encouraging our clients to change to more mature search behaviour.  The challenges which we experienced in moving from a traditional library setup to one that relies mostly on e-resources are also discussed. 

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