Champagne Information Literacy Workshops on a Beer Budget

Abstract

The University of Maryland Libraries offer drop-in information literacy workshops, which historically have been poorly attended. Previous efforts to increase attendance have focused on marketing, but a lack of time and funding for large-scale advertising hampered those efforts. One creative approach was a partnership between the UMD Libraries and the Graduate School Writing Center to offer Research and Writing Bootcamps, to leverage their respective audiences. Based on those experiences and the needs students expressed during research and writing consultations, this collaboration expanded to include a workshop on researching and writing literature reviews. Despite not launching a formal marketing campaign for that workshop, or conducting a lengthy needs assessment, twenty-four hours after opening registration, we had 165 students registered for two workshops in a 35 seat instruction room. This talk will suggest affordable ways to identify high priority topics to develop information literacy workshops that teach what students want to learn.