Each term librarians lead free workshops for students and faculty. These cover topics from data analysis to citation management tools. The librarians instructing these workshops value information literacy and strive to provide learners with skills to be successful in any field. Most workshops are offered in a hybrid mode, making them accessible to students anywhere with any learning preference. Learners at any level are encouraged to sign up and participate.

Citation Management Tools

Katherine Donaldson, associate librarian and liaison for the College of Education, is the libraries’ coordinator for graduate studies and citation management workshops. She emphasized that workshops are open to all students, faculty, and staff members. Citation management tools allow users to save and organize the research they find and generate in-text citations and reference lists in different citation style formats.

Zotero and Mendeley are the two citation tools that the librarians primarily teach. These tools can simplify working with groups by allowing you to create libraries, making it easy to share articles with each other. Both Zotero and Mendeley have integrated annotation features allowing users to read, highlight, and comment on PDFs within the tool. These specific programs are taught because they are free and allow learners to access their work after they’ve left the university. UO Libraries can provide on-going support as long as you have a UO email address to use.

When asked about her favorite part of instructing the Zotero workshops, Donaldson said, “It’s always nice when I show the citation feature on Zotero, and people see how quick it is. Hopefully these workshops can help make [academic] life easier.”

In addition to Donaldson, UO Libraries has several other experts in Zotero who lead workshops. Bronwen Maxson, Coordinator for Undergraduate Engagement and Instructional Services also serves as the subject librarian and liaison to the Spanish and Portuguese programs in the Romance Languages department, the Latin American Studies program, and the Linguistics department. She is one of our local Mendeley experts and leads workshops on that tool.

Maxson shared that citation management tools can be used to avoid plagiarism. By tracking sources of information and ideas, learners practice academic integrity.

“It’s important that learners see themselves as scholars. In the workshops, my hope is that we can value participants’ work and contributions even while we talk about the work of other people,” she added.

Data Management Tools

Data management can be intimidating, but workshops are designed to guide absolute beginners and those already in the field wanting to learn more to understand how programs like Python and R work. The instructors are passionate and want to educate any student or faculty member ready to learn.

Members of the Data Services team lead two workshops every term in Python and R, widely used languages for doing statistical analysis. Python is a broad language, dominant in machine learning, which is growing in popularity across many fields. R is used widely in statistics as well as in psychology, sociology, and education.

“We offer workshops on R and Python and provide qualitative data analysis and GitHub workshops on request. Our Friday lunch chats (Coffee + Data && Code) offer a great opportunity to meet folks interested in data and code from across the university,” said Research Data Management and Reproducibility Librarian Gabriele Hayden.

“One really great reason to attend these workshops is that these programs will be used in class, so getting a little more exposure can give you a better understanding of this new language,” Hayden added.

She went on to say, “Although these programs are used in classes, that does not imply that they are taught within those classes. We are responding to what we see as the demand on campus. We hold workshops for these specific programing [tools] because we know they’re used in classes.”

Get Started

People learn in different ways. For some, having a workshop is a good way to get an introduction to these tools and see what their capabilities are. The librarian instructors want these workshops to be accessible by any student or faculty member and encourage you to reach out with questions.

Make an appointment with a librarian to get individual help on these topics, especially if you can't make a workshop or have more specialized questions. Or, take advantage of the statistical consulting services.

Signing up for workshops is simple. Visit the Library Events Calendar to choose the workshop that best meets your interests and needs.