Training users of technical and economic information
Abstract
The work of technical and economic specialists may only be done in an up-to-date manner if these experts are supplied with appropriate, competent, reliable, and selective information. The question of being well informed is no longer the individual concern of specialists but concerns the whole society. The efforts made by the national economy to build up a system of scientific and technical information, both national and International, are really profitable only if the available technical, economic and marketing information is used up by specialists in decision-making, research and planning. To this end, specialists have to be well up in all the possible ways, means and methods, sources etc. of information and professional orientation. This was the main subject dealt with by the experts of the CMEA member-states at their Bucharest meeting on November 11–15, 1969. This Symposium on the training of users of information and the study of the users' needs was organized by the Institutul central de documentare tehnica (Central Institute of Technical Documentation). The papers and discussions at the Symposium covered the following questions of training professional users of information:
a/ training future specialists – i.e. students of universities, colleges and other higher educational institutions giving special education – in information and professional orientation in addition to their respective subject field;
b/ training specialists employed in different posts, with various educational background and experience working in different branches of industry or in different sectors of the national economy;
c/ the Symposium shows up an interesting phenomenon: all participating countries attach particular importance to the training of top professional leaders in information, therefore their training has been separated from and given priority over that of other categories of specialists.
The Symposium also shows that attempts have been made in every country at organizing special courses or series of lectures on this theme, but none of them has yet succeeded in establishing a uniform and comprehensive system of training users of information.
As to the methods of training the Polish delegation reported on a new experiment in a lecture entitled “Programmed instruction of scientific information in extension courses for engineers”.
The Symposium, moreover, briefly touched upon several other questions in this matter since, being the first such consultation, its aim was to raise problems involved in this field.
