Training of assistant librarians for the engineering libraries in Hungary

Abstract

A school system assistant-librarian training developed in Hungary after 20 years of various educational experiments with the exception of special librarian training. The Eötvös Lóránd University of Sciences (Budapest) has a 5 years day time course and a 6 years part time or corresponding course for training assistant-librarians. The Szombathely and Debrecen teachers' training college trains middle grade librarians. Special librarians are trained by a 2 and a half year special course.
Special librarian training must give a clear theoretical and practical view of engineering librarian work in order to enable the candidate to run a library alone, to do all the various phases of special library work including management problems. The training conception of the Hungarian State Office for Technical Development (Országos Műszaki Fejlesztési Bizottság) and the needs of industrial firms and research institutes demand the teaching of elementary documentation science i.e. the storage, distribution and retrieval of information. These new needs had the former syllabus - having been mainly prepaired for public library staff - reformed. The new syllabus is characterized by giving special librarian knowledge including documentation activity.