Library Training for Staff and Customers

Enable your library staff to deliver the most effective services possible!

This comprehensive book is designed to assist library professionals involved in presenting or planning training for library staff members and customers. Library Training for Staff and Customers covers training issues from many points of view ranging from top management to department managers.

Library Training for Staff and Customers contains essential information to help you make the right training decisions when planning for your staff.

Library Training for Staff and Customers explores ideas for:

• effective general reference training
• training on automated systems
• training in specialized subjects such as African-American history and biography
• training for areas such as patents and trademarks
• training for research on business subjects.
  
  Library Training for Staff and Customers answers numerous training questions and is an excellent guide for planning staff development and setting a training budget for your library. Make your library more effective and easier for your patrons to use with the strategies in this book!

Originally published in 1999 as the Journal of Library Administration (Vol. 29, No. 1), this text contains six chapters that would have been better left as a journal. As a book, it does not have a cohesive thread holding it together, and the individual articles are not detailed enough to be used in actual training for staff. The articles on reference service and training, technology training, African American reference sources, and business references are well written as journal articles but need much more in-depth expansion in a book in order to be used effectively as part of staff training. With only 83 Patent and Trademark Libraries nationwide, there doesn't seem to be sufficient rationale for the inclusion of Martha Crockett Sneed's "Fully Disclosed Yet Merely Descriptive: Intricacies of Training the Patent and Trademark Information Professional" even though the article is pertinent to those specific libraries. Glen Holt's concluding article on training is a summary on "getting training right" but pertains mostly to one urban library. A better alternative would be to pick specific titles on areas of training for the staff as needed. Not recommended.AMarie Bruni, Huntington Memorial Lib., Oneonta, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.