The Training Centre - Personal Experience

Dana Lošáková

In her presentation, Pavla Kánská precisely described the circumstances for the creation of the Training Centre. I am loosely tying in my perceptions to explain why we all need constant and regular, in fact, life-long education.

In the Government Information Policy mission statement, among other things, it is stated that:

"Life-long education is understood to be one of the highest priorities in the information society. This relates to the changes of the work cycle and forms of work, and ensuing indispensability of the constant increase of qualifications and the necessity of frequent retraining of citizens.
Libraries play a key role in the information world, as information centres generally accessible throughout the country."

It is evident that libraries will now have an increasingly important role to play. In order to fully meet the requirements of the role, there is still much to be done.

Today it is already clear what huge changes have taken place in the work of librarians in the past ten years. The use of mainframe computers that used to stand in computing centres for work in libraries was unimaginable, but today even the smallest library cannot do without its personal computers. In the last few years, librarians have had to get training in how to use computers, and today such tasks are considered a part of their daily responsibilities. Not only are computers used for cataloguing and circulation library information documents, but the purchasing of books and magazines via computer is also considered the norm, as well as searches of nearby and distant sources and downloading all kinds of information from the Internet. Typewriters in libraries have all been replaced by computers. In this way, librarians have learned to acquire more and more new information; in short, they have come to understand that they must continue to learn all the time. They have discovered the meaning of regular study and have realized that they are still capable of absorbing new information. Today, no one working in libraries is surprised by a request to learn something new; after all, nobody can afford to lag behind.

At the beginning of last year it gradually dawned on people in our library that the librarians were waiting to see what new things we would be learning. It looked as if we had acquired all the basic knowledge in librarianship. Perhaps a few of our novices could be sent for retraining courses, but what about the others? Don't they need to learn something new as well? What was new in our library was the opening of a large study room with free access to the holdings for the users. This may have resulted in some snags we never came across before, and, at the same time, it opened new possibilities for librarians to working with the users. I realised that the time had come for us to see how we can get along with each other, whether we know how to listen to our users, how we manage to deal with a difficult user, and how we are able to control ourselves so that we do not become difficult librarians. That actually was the new theme for library personnel development. I turned for help to the Sociology Department of the Faculty of Arts and asked them to organize some training for our librarians, and they did. I myself also took part in the course and we were all delighted. We learned exactly what we needed to know about interrelating with people; all the training was done in a gentle, friendly manner, and resulted in a feeling of happiness about our time spent together, getting to know each other, and gaining of new experiences.

After getting the project from the Open Society Institute Foundation, we immediately included this seminar in our Regional Training Centre programme, but even today it is evident that we will not be anywhere near able to satisfy the great demand for it.

In Olomouc, two of the largest libraries in the region are involved in the work of the Training Centre: the State Research Library and the Library of Palacký University. Together we thought about what other courses to include in the Regional Centre programme in Olomouc. In our city, there is no school for librarians; we are all very aware of the fact that our programme cannot replace formal education for librarians. We do not wish to take the place of such schools, but instead we would like to contribute to the education of librarians in another way, perhaps with what they may not have enough time for. They are trained in various levels of computer literacy. They can complete courses on the basics of law, or a course on the works of historical holdings, as well as a course on working with child readers.

Only some of the initial activities of the Training Centre have now got under way. At times we may stumble as we get along, at times we misunderstand each other a little, and sometimes we do have enough self-confidence; nevertheless, we all feel that we have set out to do work which is necessary and very, very important. So I must concede a point to Professor Lass. I now really feel as he does that we will succeed in accomplishing the whole of this great project only if we are really capable of getting along with one another.