As Health Sciences Libraries evolve, the support they offer graduate students has evolved to incorporate many aspects of the research life cycle. At Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences, we have partnered with the Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research to offer training workshops for graduate students who are interested in using bioinformatics to plan, analyze, or execute scientific experiments. We offer two series: 1) an 8-week, 1-hour per week seminar series providing a general overview of available techniques and 2) a week-long intensive, two hours per session, series on utilizing free databases from the National Center for Biotechnology and Information (NCBI). Workshops have been offered for four years; a consistent challenge has been the variety of experience of participants, particularly in their biological science content background. To address this challenge and provide a solid foundation for the series, in 2019 we conducted a basic genetics session prior to engaging with the NCBI databases. In this lesson, we introduced participants to the central dogma of biology and utilized that knowledge in active learning sessions, with the goal of a shared understanding of the biological processes of transcription and translation. This understanding is essential to effectively using the gene and protein databases to interpret data and plan experiments. In addition to laying a solid content foundation, these activities set the stage for an interactive series and allowed participants to feel comfortable with the content and with interacting with each other. Feedback for the sessions was largely positive with 86% of survey respondents indicating enjoying the genetics portion specifically. The activities utilized open access learning materials and could be adapted for bioinformatic workshops at other institutions
