The last time I talked about the workshops presented by my library, I discussed how we were trying a new online format to boost accessibility and attendance. During the Fall 2018 term, my colleagues and I held six workshops on the following topics:

• PubMed Basics
• Using EndNote Basic in Research
• Research Data Management Basics
• Open Access 101
• Collecting Data with REDCap
• Assessing Research Impact with Altmetrics

These are fairly typical workshop topics for our library, so the only big change was the delivery format – we even held the live session at the same time we would hold our in-person workshops.

Our procedure was to hold the live workshop on Adobe Connect, record the session, and make the recording available on our workshop LibGuide. We also distributed evaluation surveys to attendees at the end of each workshop. At the end of the term, we were able to review our attendance data, evaluation results, and viewing statistics and determine if it would be worth the effort to continue these online workshops.

I’ll save the details for our pending publication (*wink*), but suffice it to say, we did decide to prepare another slate of online workshops for the Spring 2019 term. The only major change we made was to shorten the duration of the workshops; instead of 50-minute online workshops, we shortened them to 20-minutes. Our hope is that a smaller time commitment will be more enticing to both live viewers and those who watch the recording.

So far, we’ve delivered one workshop, a “Library Bootcamp” to familiarize attendees with library resources and services. Stay tuned to find out how the Spring 2019 workshops turn out!