Meeting Needs and Building Institutional Knowledge through Diversifying Research Workshops

Background: The needs of the students, faculty, and researchers that our library serves, has evolved over the past four years. It has become increasingly common for our patrons to ask more complex questions that. often call for repeated consultations. In the same time period, our library lost four librarian positions. While we have been understaffed, the colleges our library serves continue to grow, and user requests are more time and labor-intensive. To meet their needs, a virtual Lunch & Learn Research Workshop Series was developed. The program objectives were to teach frequently requested topics and to create recordings to share.

Description: To determine which workshops to offer, we looked at and discussed the questions we received over the past few years. Systematic Reviews, EndNote, and PubMed were the most requested topics. We also included workshops that introduced new library users to our resources and specific databases. Initially, the workshop series was going to be held in our Zoom equipped conference room so that we could record the workshops. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to adjust our plan and offer the series completely via Zoom. We created a website for the workshop series which included the registration link, recording links, and handouts from the workshops. Participants who registered for the sessions were sent calendar invites as well as the link to the recording of the session.

Conclusion: Our virtual workshop series is in progress. An evaluation form was created to assess the program. The outcomes we are expecting to measure are: did it meet their expectations, did participating learn something new, and would they recommend the workshops to others. We have received anecdotal positive feedback and plan to continue the workshop series for Spring 2021.