Yesterday, I went to a collections use workshop organised on behalf of Collections Victoria.
Essentially they want to find out how people are using their services and to that end have organised a series of workshops with people working on local history projects, and yours truly was one of them.
I won't go into what we said or did, because I don't think it was particularly remarkable but one key takeaway is that a lot of the participants said that they found trove, the NLA's digital resources website difficult to use.
I didn't have time to drill into what was difficult to use, but I got the feeling that a lot of people felt that they did not know how to search effectively online.
Most of those involved were reasonably competent local historians, used to dealing with books and paper archives but being in their sixties appear to have missed out on digital skills training or simply didn't have the opportunity in their past professional lives.
Seems like there might be a training need. And possibly one not to difficult to fill, after all most university libraries have been running online search skills courses for years ....
Essentially they want to find out how people are using their services and to that end have organised a series of workshops with people working on local history projects, and yours truly was one of them.
I won't go into what we said or did, because I don't think it was particularly remarkable but one key takeaway is that a lot of the participants said that they found trove, the NLA's digital resources website difficult to use.
I didn't have time to drill into what was difficult to use, but I got the feeling that a lot of people felt that they did not know how to search effectively online.
Most of those involved were reasonably competent local historians, used to dealing with books and paper archives but being in their sixties appear to have missed out on digital skills training or simply didn't have the opportunity in their past professional lives.
Seems like there might be a training need. And possibly one not to difficult to fill, after all most university libraries have been running online search skills courses for years ....
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