Tools, Policies, and Best Practices: Level Up with the Fall 2025 Digital Scholarship & Data Workshops

This fall, take your digital or data-intensive scholarship to the next level with the help of UK Libraries’ Digital Scholarship & Data Workshops.

Offered by the digital scholarship and data librarians at UK Libraries’ newest space, The Stacks: Digital Scholarship Center, these workshops begin on Tuesday, August 26 and last throughout the fall semester.

The Fall 2025 schedule includes:

• A spotlight workshop exploring pre-digital data practices using historical Kentucky weather ledgers
• Virtual workshops covering tools, resources, and data management best practices
• Recurring open office hours for thesis and dissertation planning and submission assistance

Research Data Librarian Isaac Wink is also offering a short workshop series on programming with Python on the first three Tuesdays in September.

UKnowledge (IR) Library Specialist Kyle Bachman-Johnson will hold two sets of open office hours monthly throughout the Fall semester for all UK Libraries users planning on writing or submitting a thesis or dissertation.

Workshops are designed to help students, faculty, and researchers improve and expand their capacities to use digital tools in their work and scholarship, with broad appeal to all data-intensive disciplines. 

The workshops are free to attend and open to all UK students, faculty, and staff. Registration is required to attend. 

Please contact TheStacks@uky.edu with any questions.

Digital Scholarship & Data Workshops: Tools, Policies, & Best Practices

Workshops held throughout the semester will introduce users to a wide variety of special topics in digital scholarship and data management. Find available software and tools, demystify your data management plan, and explore pre-digital data practices with historical Kentucky weather ledgers.

• Software Sample: Free Software Licenses from UK
  • Don’t break the bank for expensive software! As a member of the UK community, you have free access to a wide range of popular software for academic use, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365, EndNote, MATLAB, and more. This online presentation from UK Libraries will explore how to access these and other programs for free by using the ITS Software Downloads Center and the UK Virtual Den, as well as how to sign up for academic licenses for other software directly.
  • Tuesday, August 26, 2025
  • 2pm – 3pm
  • Zoom
  • Register here.
     
• Navigating the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy at UK
  • The NIH’s Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy, which went into effect in January 2023, has established new requirements for grant applicants to put forward a plan explaining how their research data will be made accessible to other researchers and the public. At this session, Research Data Librarian Isaac Wink will cover the major elements of the policy researchers need to know and provide guidance on writing successful data management and sharing plans. Specific topics will include: an overview of the DMS Policy and its requirements; resources for developing a DMS plan; suggestions for selecting a data repository and budgeting for data management and sharing; and perspectives on data management practices to ensure that scientific data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR).
  • Friday, September 5
  • 12pm – 1pm
  • Zoom
  • Register here.
     
• Beyond Canvas: Power Up Your Course with CreateUK
  • Whether you are teaching or learning online, in person, or a little of both, CreateUK is a web-hosting service managed by UK Libraries that can increase student engagement beyond Canvas. With built-in popular, open-source applications such as WordPress, Omeka, Scalar, and many more, CreateUK offers faculty and students a platform to connect with course content and projects in new and meaningful ways. Join us to learn how to get started with your own CreateUK account. This workshop will be offered in two identical sessions.
  • Session 1
    • Monday, September 8
    • 1pm – 2pm
    • Zoom
    • Register here.
  • Session 2
    • Friday, September 12
    • 1pm – 2pm
    • Zoom
    • Register here.
       
• Beyond the Manuscript: Effective Data Sharing for Boosting Research Impact
  • The datasets you produce in your research aren’t just an add-on to your publications – they can be standalone research outputs that can be cited, reused, and contribute to new findings. But not all shared data is good data, and datasets aren’t likely to be reused or cited if they’re disorganized, poorly described, or hard to access. This session will cover everything you need to know about maximizing the citation and reuse of your data, including picking a data repository that tracks usage metrics, curating your data prior to sharing, and making it as simple as possible for others to find, access, and cite your work.
  • Friday, September 26, 2025
  • 12pm – 1pm
  • Zoom 
  • Register here.
     
• Data Rescue Workshop
  • This hands-on event is designed to empower attendees with the skills to identify, capture, and preserve federal datasets that may be vulnerable to deletion or alteration. Bring your own device and come ready to collaborate, learn, and make a difference in safeguarding public data.
  • Wednesday, October 8
  • 11am – 12:30pm
  • The Stacks Presentation Space
  • Register here.
     
• Scary Stories in Excel
  • Do you find Excel constantly not displaying your data correctly? Don’t worry, your computer isn’t haunted—but Excel isn’t always built to do exactly what you want. This workshop will cover some of the most common mistakes made with entering, organizing, and cleaning data in Excel, showcase examples of these mistakes having big impacts in business and research, and give you the understanding you need to guard against these haunted mistakes. 
  • Friday, October 31
  • 12pm – 1pm
  • Zoom
  • Register here.
     
• Kentucky Data Spotlight: Data Collection and Documentation with Historical Weather Ledgers
  •  What did data look like before the digital age, and what can it teach us about data collection, organization, and documentation for modern research? Join us to explore more than 100 years of Kentucky weather ledgers containing hand-collected records from the National Weather Service, focusing on periods of three historic floods in 1913, 1937, and 1978. Get your data fix with a side of local history as we answer questions like: How do teams of data collectors make sure they’re recording information in a consistent manner? How do individual data points get combined and transformed to produce meaningful summary results? How do long-term data collection projects change over time while still enabling comparison to the past?
  • Wednesday, November 12
  • 2pm – 3pm
  • The Stacks Presentation Space
  • Register here.
     
• Who’s Counting? Locating and Using Gray Data in Health Sciences Research
  • Governments, non-profits, and international non-governmental organizations all collect and publish data that can be used for a variety of purposes in the health sciences, such as estimating disease prevalence across different regions or identifying potentially promising interventions for further study. But these “gray data” sources are often difficult to find and require researchers to understand their full context before analyzing them or bringing them together with other data sources. This session will cover some of the benefits of working with gray data, strategies for systematically locating data sources, and data management workflows for accurately reporting findings. 
  • Tuesday, November 18
  • 12pm – 1pm
  • Zoom
  • Register here.

Need more data? 

Visit our Research Workshops & Tutorials page to find all the opportunities to improve your research skills with UK Libraries, including the Fall 2025 Research Workshop Series presented by the Medical Center Library.