​YELLO Workshops

A long time ago, well…October last year, at an ‘Open Access Week’ foyer roadshow at Craiglockhart, Keith Walker and Joyce Templeton had a good, long chat with ENSA President, Rojan Subramani. He told us about his idea for YELLO workshops and asked if we’d like to be involved by doing a couple of sessions at one of the workshops.  

 
Fast forward to January 25th 2017 and the original idea had developed into the Fourth Year Dissertation Conference at Craiglockhart. The conference took place in the Lindsay Stewart lecture theatre from 1pm-4pm and over 80 fourth year students attended. There were a number of short presentations by Mark Carver, Rojan, Gerry Matthews-Smith (by pre-recorded video) and Brian Webster-Henderson. Then followed a series of four 20 minute sessions or workshops, repeated four times so students could attend all of them. We were involved in delivering two of the four workshops:

• Library Research
• Referencing
• Literature Reviewing
• Get writing!

Keith Walker delivered the Referencing workshop, exploring referencing styles, referencing guides and reference management (focusing on the Reference Management LibGuide). Joyce Templeton delivered the Library Research session exploring the resources and services available to students beginning their 4th year dissertation eg. setting up search alerts on LibrarySearch and databases, Subject Librarians, LibGuides, LibCal and what to do if they can’t find a book or article.

Although we had to repeat the same session four times, the students seemed to get some useful things from the sessions and there was a lot of note-taking going on and photos taken by smartphones of the presentations! After every session students asked for further details about a piece of information from the presentation. Overall, it was an interesting conference and students took something useful away from it to apply to their fourth year dissertation.