This is a two-part presentation given by reference librarians Rochelle Ballard and Meg Scharf. Meg first described UCF’s new CD-ROM services. Patron expectations were very high. Although a great deal of assistance was sometimes needed, patrons wanted to be able to search autonomously, which meant they needed instruction. Instruction was delivered to individual patrons at the time of need; through demonstrations held in the area that housed the CD Rooms; in workshops; and in the regular instruction classes delivered by librarians to students at the request of teaching faculty members.
Rochelle, who was instrumental in establishing UCF’s end-user services with CD-ROMs, and later with online databases and the Internet, then gave the most important part of the presentation: how UCF librarians learned about searching the 13 CD-ROM databases, and the writing and use of “How to Search” handouts. New CD-ROMs were held back from the Reference floor, so librarians could learn to use them before they fielded questions from students, faculty, and community patrons. She describes workshops held for users in the Bibliographic Instruction classroom. Rochelle, UCF’s expert on the CD-ROMs at the time, describes getting “the shakes at the thought of a new CD-ROM with a different search system.”
Some librarians in the audience came from libraries with no CD-ROMs available, and others were at the beginning of offering them to patrons. So while this presentation seems very elementary, at that time it was regarded as a bit “cutting edge”
