Content area
Full Text
Introduction
LIS schools and programmes, faculty and students have been often limited - for cost reasons - to using only databases and software tools which are licensed by their hosting university to serve the needs of the departments with the largest student body and faculty. The LIS units almost never belong to that league, as most of them have a faculty below 15, and a student body below 150 even in the most developed countries.
One of the key objectives of the efficient education in the Library and Information Sciences (LIS) programmes is to teach the students to become savvy searchers, and empower them to be efficient finders of information pertinent for the end-users. GEP officially stands for Graduate Education Program, but being free for LIS educators and students, it could also be the acronym for Generous Endowment Package. It is an outstanding tool set for LIS educators to teach and demonstrate to future and practicing librarians state-of-the-art online digital resource discovery, information retrieval, and post-processing services from hundreds of indexing/abstracting (I&A), full-text (FT), and directory databases, widely used in public, school, university, and research libraries.
The large database collection of GEP includes two sophisticated software tools (Summon and RefWorks) and many novel training and self-study resources. These provide a perfect infrastructure to help LIS instructors and students in doing research for their course work, preparing and presenting digital course materials, irrespective of what resources are available at their university which hosts the LIS school/programme. GEP is made available free of charge worldwide, i.e. not only to ALA and NCATE accredited LIS schools in the USA and Canada, but to all qualifying LIS schools (except for the Dialog Professional module available only to ALA accredited library schools).
There are rules for qualifying to access the free GEP service, with details available at [email protected], but Karen Hinton, Manager of Customer Education and Training for the Northwest American region, summarised the conditions well, and gives the opportunity to acknowledge her help in this research:
GEP and its sister project ERP (Educational Resources Program are available to faculty and students of graduate degree programs in library science and related disciplines worldwide. ProQuest is also available to instructors at schools of education recognized by the National Council for Accreditation...