Teaching Practical Data Skills Through Tools: Takeaways From Piloting A Collaborative Workshop Series

In fall 2025, two research data librarians in the Research Data and Open Scholarship unit at Cornell University piloted the Data Den, an eight-part workshop series aimed at helping beginners learn tools used for data collection, analysis, and sharing. The series was a collaborative effort bringing in instructors from across the library system and campus data services outside of the library. Our goals for the Data Den were to: promote core open science values such as reproducibility and transparency; offer introductory-level instruction focused on data and computational skills that can be broadly used across any discipline; strengthen collaboration amongst our colleagues; and expand our outreach efforts and visibility. To measure our progress toward these goals, we developed pre- and post-workshop surveys and gathered the feedback of our colleagues and co-instructors. In this presentation, we will talk through what we learned from the first run of the series, including trends in registration and attendance, and key takeaways from the feedback we collected.