Staffing the user services function

Abstract

Ten years ago, User Services Organizations did not exist at most university computer installations. In fact, the need for this type of service wasn't present ten years ago. At that time computers were rather small, and research processing was a hands-on operation. Most of the computer users were from the hard sciences --- math and physics. Very few social scientists had the background or desire to learn how to program the computer to perform the data analyses required in their research. BMD, one of the first statistical packages, was begun in 1964. This was followed by SPSS in 1965, and SAS in 1966. These packages were developed in response to a need --- the need to simplify the process of data handling and statistical analyses. At the same time, however, those packages opened the world of computers to many new users who had little or no technical background in computer science. User Services Departments have evolved in large part to meet the need for assistance by such unsophisticated users.