It is important that even experienced neurophysiologists undergo some level of education or training prior to use of the probes. Our probe catalog has short descriptions of the probe process, acute and chronic assembly techniques, a multichannel amplifier schematic, the available probe designs and relevant publications describing probe fabrication and use. Using this catalog and initial consultation on the phone or through email, the experienced neurophysiologist can often be successful with basic acute experiments. An E-mail alias which goes to all of our users has been useful for allowing them to communicate with each other and broadcast problems which may have been solved by other users. The homepage also contains information relevant to first-time and even more advanced probe users. For those users who have special needs and/or difficult preparations, we offer funded or partially funded visits to our institution. These one-on-one visits have been extremely successful and have yielded our most satisfied collaborators. The summer course which was held in years previous to the Center's funding has been discontinued. It was felt that more users and potential users would attend a workshop at a national conference which they would be attending anyway. The first probe workshop was held at the 1995 Society for Neuroscience and was attended by over 30 people. Content included presentations by Center staff as well as short user presentations. The general consensus was that the workshop was useful and should be held again in the future. We anticipate the use of training videos in the future but have not completed production of our first one as yet.
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