AUB libraries partnership with the Graduate Council, Writing Center and other departments on campus

The presentation will summarize the collaborative work between the University Libraries, Graduate Council and Writing Center at AUB. Joining efforts started with a series of four core graduate workshops to all graduate students at AUB and expanded to two disciplinary specific workshops. We’ll share with you, how we started this initiative, what we learned from this experience and the possibility of expanding this collaboration to other departments on campus.

At AUB, the Library has a very active instruction program; the Writing Center regularly offers workshops on a wide range of academic writing topics and was looking for ways to help students find relevant and reliable resources for their papers; and the Graduate Council is looking for a proactive role in graduate students’ academic life. Prior to 2014 each unit worked individually on supporting research at the university.

In 2014, the three units discussed the possibility of collaborating to co-develop a workshop for graduate students and they initiated the “Research and Thesis Writing Workshop Series.” A series of four workshops offered throughout the year focusing on doing research, preparing the proposal, writing the thesis, and publishing. Recently, two panel discussions where professors from different disciplines share their experience with students became part of the series. This collaboration gave us the opportunity to learn from one another, improved our workshops for student benefit, and increased openness to other potential collaborations. In 2018, faculty members got interested, the School of Public Health and the Department of Sociology requested disciplinary specific workshops and made attendance compulsory. We will share our experience and highlight how our collaboration came to be, how we developed our efforts, participants’ feedback, and what we learned from these workshops.