We offer ongoing, regularly occurring workshops on the basics of how to use your libraries. Offered by either Columbia University Libraries or Teachers College, these sessions are open to anyone at Columbia and are typically appropriate for any level. (No prior library or research knowledge necessary!) Workshops are held weekly on various days and times to easily accommodate your schedule and are all one hour or less.

Columbia University Libraries is home to thousands of rare and unique archives, rare books, and manuscripts. Under the heading “special collections,” these materials, including digital resources, are of singular value to teaching and research. Sessions on how to find and use special collections are offered by curators, historians, and digital scholarship specialists in a variety of disciplines. Workshops presented in this directory represent a small sample of the wide array of course-integrated and open sessions offered by the Libraries; students and faculty can reach out for individual assistance with special collections, and staff can also work with the Libraries to tailor a bespoke primary-source session for any class at Columbia.

We offer workshops on various aspects of digital publishing and scholarly communication, centering on support for partners in our podcasting and journal publishing programs but open to anyone at Columbia interested in learning more about the mechanics and best practices of scholarly publishing in various media. Frequent workshop topics include the production and dissemination of podcasts, editorial best practices for journal editors, and (for accepted journal-program partners) setting up and maintaining journals using Open Journals Systems (OJS).

We build critical data literacies for library users at all levels to find, evaluate, understand, steward, and use data. Our experts offer training modules on data-research-related techniques and subjects such as data mining and analysis, text analysis, music technology, Python, relational databases, geographic information systems (GIS), web mapping, and more.

Our Foundations for Research Computing series, hosted in collaboration with CUIT and the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research, provides informal training for Columbia University graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to develop fundamental skills for harnessing computation: core languages and libraries, software development tools, best practices, and computational problem-solving.