2001 BELLSOUTH COMMUNITY INTERNET WORKSHOPS

Made possible by sponsorship from BellSouth, University Libraries is in the fourth year of offering its Community Internet Workshops. Offered at the WKU South Campus Conference Center since January 1998, the monthly Thursday night hands-on two-hour sessions are devoted to topics of popular interest and are open to the general public. Twenty-five different topics have been offered to date, with six new topics introduced each year. Popular workshops repeated year-to-year include Internet Browsing and Searching, Genealogy, Travel, and Weather. New topics to be introduced for 2001 include Sites for Families with Young Children, Folkways on the Web, Romance Novels, Antiques and Collectibles, Chatrooms, and Online Music.

BellSouth sponsorship provides funding to cover the rental of the computer lab at the South Campus and production of brochures advertising the series and duplication of individual session handouts. To date, 338 participants have attended the workshops with a core of "regulars" who return frequently as well as newcomers every month who learn of the series from the brochures, newspaper ads, the Libraries web site and recommendations from friends. Evaluations of the workshops by attendees have been overwhelmingly positive with 61 percent considering the overall quality of the workshops "excellent" and 36 percent as "good." 

The Libraries' Community Internet Workshops series has received campus, statewide and national recognition. The series received a WKU 1999-2000 Academic Affairs Unit Productivity Award, has been the subject of presentations at the Kentucky Library Association and the American Library Association, and was featured in an article published in the summer 2000 issue of Kentucky Libraries.

For more information about the 2001 BellSouth Community Internet Workshop schedule, call the WKU Reference Center at 270-745-6125 or consult the workshop schedule on the Libraries' Home Page at www.wku.edu/Library and click on Workshops in the right-hand column under News and Events

~Elaine Moore
 
 

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