Workshops and Webinars

It takes time for your work to be formally cited by other researchers, and common citation indexes do not work equally well for all disciplines and research methods. Alternative metrics, or “altmetrics,” are faster and wider-ranging measures of the impact that your work is having on other researchers and the general public. This workshop will introduce you to current altmetrics tools and how they’re being used to demonstrate the value of research.

A citation manager helps organize PDFs and notes as well as format citations in thousands of styles. Unfortunately, there is no best citation manager. The three citation managers the library teaches--EndNote Basic, Mendeley, and Zotero--all have different strengths and weaknesses. This class previews each citation manager and explains the differences between them.

After you have collected and organized some data, one of the next steps is preparing the data for analysis. Some of this involves "data cleaning," where errors in the data are identified and corrected or formatting made consistent. OpenRefine is a powerful free and open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it and transforming it from one format into another. This hands-on lesson will teach you to use OpenRefine to effectively clean and format data and automatically track any changes that you make.

Copyright raises many questions: What can I use freely? When do I need to get permission? How do I protect my intellectual property? This workshop will provide an overview of U.S. copyright law in the academic setting and point the way to resources that help in making decisions and knowing when to seek legal advice.

When is it OK to download, rip, stream, copy, distribute, or perform art, music, or scholarship created by others? What happens if you do something that’s not OK? What about your own creations? Should you assign your rights to your publisher, or retain some for yourself? We can’t give you legal advice, but we can point you to guides that will help you thread your way through the U.S. Copyright landscape.

Traditional publishing agreements require that authors transfer their copyright to the publisher, unduly limiting options for online distribution, classroom use, and other purposes. In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore how authors can grant some rights to publishers without signing away all their rights. Participants are encouraged to bring publisher agreements or copyright transfer agreements from the journals in which they publish. 

Creative Commons licenses give everyone a free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for their creative works, and allow others to copy, share, and customize those works. Learn the basics of the six CC licenses, how to apply those licenses to your own creative works, and how to find CC-licensed images, videos, music, and other media that you can use in your classes, projects, and research.

If you're ready to know more about using social and political data, public opinion polling data, and public datasets for quantitative research, this is the workshop for you! We’ll start from the beginning and no question will be too simple.

Researchers often end up collecting and working with data in spreadsheets, and tend to organize that data in ways that make sense to them. In order to use tools for efficient computation and visualization of data, it is important to structure the data in ways that computers best understand it. In this hands-on lesson, you will learn: Good data entry practices - formatting data tables in spreadsheets, how to avoid common formatting mistakes, approaches for handling dates in spreadsheets, basic quality control and data manipulation in spreadsheets, and exporting data to other formats.

Explore the world of literature reviews through this hands-on workshop highlighting different types of reviews, the process involved in creating each one, and an overview of best practices. Interactive searching and writing activities will give you the practical skills and resources needed to structure literature reviews for your discipline, while saving you time and effort.

The Digital Services Department digitizes material from the Libraries’ collections with two major goals: 1) to support teaching and research at MU, and 2) to make our unique and rare materials available to users worldwide. In this session, the presenters will review the process for requesting that items be digitized and show completed projects available through the MU Digital Library. They also will review the digitization process and highlight the characteristics of a good digital image.

When engaging with a complex and multi-faceted collection materials, it's natural to have questions: How can I tell whether the University Libraries have access to a specific journal? Where can I obtain a copy of a book that our Libraries don't own? And why is that article that I could access yesterday no longer available? Learn more about the size, scope, and entryways into MU's collections in this webinar, designed especially for faculty, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers.

In this workshop, we will review the two subscription-based data archives that are available to MU affiliates through the University Libraries: ICPSR and the Roper Center for Political and Social Research. We will also cover sources for additional, freely available data that can be downloaded from the internet.

EndNote is a commercial citation manager which is available at no cost to MU students. The class provides hands-on practice configuring EndNote to download PDFs, ways to get citations and PDFs into EndNote as well as how to get citations from EndNote into Word documents.

Mendeley is a citation manager that began as freeware. The basic program is still free, but paid subscriptions which provide more cloud storage are available. The hands-on class covers the basics of adding citations and PDFs to Mendeley as well as getting citations from Mendeley into Word documents.

Bibliographies no longer have to be a frustrating component of your research paper. Zotero is a free and simple open-source research tool that can organize, manage and format your bibliography content. In our workshop, learn how to use Zotero to help create your bibliographies and in-text citations by extracting citations from PDFs and web pages.

It is relatively easy to find books or articles on a subject, but there is much more to discover at the University Library. Scholars who want to take a deeper dive into library collections will find primary sources, technical reports, patent applications, drawings and a variety of other materials that came to us by way of the federal government. Attend this workshop to learn how to get off the beaten path in your research and study, and discover fascinating materials you never thought it would be possible to find.

It is your responsibility as a news consumer to be critical and skeptical. This session will share fact-checking and verification techniques to assist you in determining whether what you are reading online is fact or fake.

This session will provide an overview on facilitating the access and reuse of your research data. Learn how to comply with funding agency policies, create data management plans, and submit data sets to MOspace, MU’s digital institutional repository.

This workshop will help you kick your project off right by considering the "nuts & bolts" of how you will manage your data, file naming, folder structures, readmes, and how your datasets relate to each other. By the end of this session, you should be able to: understand file naming best practices, understand file/directory organization best practices, be able to write a readme file with necessary elements, and understand different formats for organizing data, e.g. spreadsheets, flat files, and databases.

Learn how to effectively use researcher profiles and scholarly communications networks to develop and manage your online scholarly presence. Utilize ORCID, Google Scholar Profile, MOspace, h-index, impact factors and more to maximize your professional impact.

The University Libraries host two digital repositories that support teaching and research at MU. The MOspace Institutional Repository includes faculty and student papers and presentations, and MU theses and dissertations. The MOspace Digital Library includes digital facsimiles of rare and special materials in the University Libraries. Learn more about these resources and how you can contribute your own content to them.

Learn how to make your research and scholarship more widely available via Open Access. In addition to information and advice on the how’s and why’s of Open Access publishing, topics will include assessing the quality of Open Access journals, navigating publisher agreements, and posting articles to MOspace, MU’s digital institutional repository.

Are your students struggling with the cost of course materials? Would you like the freedom and flexibility to customize the content of textbooks and other learning objects to better align with your lessons and assignments? Open educational resources, or OER, are free, openly licensed educational materials that provide alternatives to traditional textbooks. Learn more about campus resources that can help you find, create, and use high-quality OER.

You create large amounts of digital content. What happens to that content after its creation? Will it be discoverable next year? In five years? Personal Digital Archiving provides a set of best practices for scholars to preserve and manage their content long after it has been created.

Providing online access to your thesis or dissertation makes it more visible and available to fellow researchers around the world. But what about copyright and other publishing agreements? Do you need to get permission to include images? Learn about all the options, logistics, and complications of promoting your work with MOspace, the online repository for all MU theses and dissertations issued since 2006.

Research the history of American education using the University Libraries' rich collection of government publications and the state documents available through our membership in the Center for Research Libraries.

Many researchers need to put the topic of their study into historical context. This workshop will teach you how to find federal and state statistics as well as description and narrative discussion on any topic that fell under the purview of government agencies. Such topics include agriculture, business and commerce, labor and economics, child welfare and education, rural sociology, land management and environmental stewardship, transportation and infrastructure, technology and innovation, and more.

Special Collections has over 90,000 items – from rare books and manuscripts to comics and posters – and a staff that wants to empower you to use them. We’ll provide an overview of our collections and cover strategies for using Special Collections in class visits, undergraduate assignments, and your own research.

The United States has a long history of innovation which can be tracked in the records of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In this session, you will learn how to use the USPTO’s online research tools, and view history through the lens of technological innovation.

Learn how the University of Missouri Libraries supports faculty, post-docs, and grad students in this start-of-semester introduction to our access, research, and instructional services. Whether you've just arrived at MU and have yet to explore our Libraries, or an experienced scholar who wants a refresher on our current services and resources, you're certain to learn something new that will help you with your teaching and research needs.

Hey, undergraduates and grad students: set yourself up for success with this introduction to the University of Missouri Libraries! Get the basics on our locations, services, and collections, and learn some handy tips, tricks, and tools for getting started with college-level research. Ask questions, get answers!

You've done the research; now make sure your work gets noticed and makes an impact! Learn how to identify publishing venues, evaluate journals, and avoid “predatory publishers," so that your research gets the visibility it deserves.

Would you like us to present a workshop or webinar on a topic not listed here? Fill out our Workshop / Webinar Request Form and let us know what you have in mind!