WVU Libraries Graduate Student Library Immersion Program
August 8-10, 2022
Downtown Library
The Graduate Student Library Immersion Program is a three-day intensive workshop designed to improve participants’ research skills with hands-on activities and demonstrations on a variety of resources, methods, tools and topics. The program focuses on addressing participants' research challenges and building community both within and across disciplines.
Subject librarians will be available for individual consultations about participants’ research interests and challenges.
Lunch and refreshments are provided along with a $125 stipend upon successful completion.
Admission to the program is competitive and will be balanced to ensure representation across disciplines. Applications will be evaluated based on the alignment of applicants’ expressed research interests, needs, and challenges with the program’s offerings.
Please contact
Alyssa.Wright@mail.wvu.edu with questions.
The application due date is May 26, 2022
Apply Now2021 Immersion Program Session Descriptions
The program will be held in person at the Downtown Campus Library and will include a blend of whole-group and concurrent sessions, with participants choosing the concurrent sessions most relevant to their research.
Library Essentials
This introductory session aims for broad coverage of key library resources, including interlibrary loan, finding subject-specific databases, study rooms, liaison librarians, the Research Repository, and more.
Managing Information with Zotero
Reference managers help collect, organize, cite, and share research. Zotero is open source, providing 300 mb of free, cloud-based storage while leaving you in control of your data. This session will provide hands-on practice with Zotero's basic features.
Archives/Special Collections
This session will cover the what, where, how, and why of primary source research at the WVRHC. In additional to these basics, we will discuss critical approaches to the historical record, namely issues surrounding power and marginalization in the archives.
Creating and Managing Your Online Scholarly Presence
During this session, you will learn how to build and manage an online scholarly identity. We will look at common platforms for creating scholarly profiles, and tools that allow you to share your research openly and track the impact of your work.
Literature Review
Why and how do you start a literature review? Building on the Research Consultations with Subject Librarians and the Zotero introduction, this session will walk through the basic steps of a literature review and provide short, hands-on activities for practice in applying techniques.
Teaching with Wikipedia
Learn about techniques for using Wikipedia in the classroom, including how to develop assignments that allow students to write for a wide range of audiences by editing, contributing to, or authoring Wikipedia articles while conducting relevant research.
Dispelling the Myths of Open Access
This workshop will discuss open access vs. traditional publishing venues and will include a section about predatory publishers' practices. Resources that are available to help find appropriate journals in which to publish will be demonstrated, and WVU Libraries' sources of assistance for open access publishing will be outlined.
Research Data Management
Research Data Management is the process of organizing, documenting, sharing, and preserving the data generated through the course of a research project. In this workshop, you will learn about best practices for managing your data efficiently, which will help to ensure that your data is well documented, reusable, organized, stored, and preserved.
Information Privilege
This discussion-based session will focus on the ways that access to information is dependent on status, power, and affiliation.
Systematic Review
This session will discuss the basics of conducting a systematic review and how they are different from traditional literature reviews. Topics will include how to frame a research question, developing a search strategy and searching the social science, scientific, and biomedical literature databases.
Humanities Primary Source Databases
This hands-on session will introduce participants to a variety of primary source databases with access to resources including literature, newspapers, multimedia, images, government information, and other archival materials. Participants will have the opportunity to explore these databases themselves during the session.
A Primer in Data Visualization
Are you interested in data visualization but don’t know where to start? This workshop is designed to teach new Tableau users how to prepare their data, understand the Tableau interface, create basic visualizations (i.e. bar chart, heat map, etc.), and combine visualizations into a dashboard.
Finding Data Sets
This session will describe the data landscape and give you tools to learn how to efficiently find data sources to suit your needs. Session will include hands-on exposure to general resources including the data repository, ICPSR.
Basics of File Management
During the life of a research project, you generate a lot of files, but how much thought do you give to their management, storage, and preservation? How often should you backup your materials and what steps do you need to take to preserve your data so that it remains accessible in the long-term? How can you keep track of different edits, drafts, and versions of files? In this session you will learn how to create a systematic storage process to secure your data against a wide range of loss scenarios, and track changes to your files over time.
Research Consultations with Subject Librarians
Participants will be asked to submit research topics and questions before the program. Subject librarians will answer questions and discuss resources in small group sessions based on topic expertise.