Methods of teaching on-line bibliographic searching: Experience at the College of Librarianship Wales

摘要

We have been teaching students about on-line bibliographic searching since 1972. With the help of British Library Research and Development Department funding we have recently extended our teaching in this area and now use services such as Lockheed, System Development Corporation and the British Library's BLAISE. This paper discusses aspects of the design of courses on on-line bibliographic searching, describes various methods we have used to demonstrate searches to students in order to prepare them for undertaking a live search themselves, and compares the relative costs, in terms of system costs and staff time, of these methods. The methods of demonstration involve the playing back of recorded searches on videotape, audio cassettes and digital cassettes as well as live demonstration and may be of interest to other teachers of library and information science students or to those involved in the training of people to carry out on-line bibliographic searching.