I love teaching Tropy workshops. It is a delight to see the glimmer of hope and excitement in people’s eyes as they realize their research photos don’t have to be a gigantic stressful mess. But I can’t be everywhere, and I can’t teach everyone.

For this new development cycle, the Tropy team will be hitting the road with a slightly different aim: teaching you how to teach Tropy. In a series of workshops over the next two years, Tropy team members will be teaching librarians and faculty members how to use Tropy for themselves and best practices for teaching it to others.

We’ll be traveling to ten cities, where we’ll be offering two different Train the Trainers workshops in each location. We’ll be running the workshops in places that are easily accessible for people from many local institutions to attend.

The first track will be for librarians and archivists. We’re looking for metadata librarians, or archivists who frequently interact with patrons doing research in their collections, or librarians who teach skills training as part of the library services. Librarians are often the first people researchers come to once they’ve taken thousands of research photos and don’t know what to do with them. We want to help you to help those researchers.

The second track will be for humanities faculty (or not humanities) who require or teach about archival research. If you teach an introductory theory and methods course, or if you ask students to write papers based on archival research, this workshop is for you. We’ll teach you how to use Tropy for yourself, and also how to help your graduate students get off to a good start as they begin their own archival work.

So where will we be going for Train the Trainers workshops?

  • Boston (November 13, 2018: details here)
  • Atlanta
  • Chicago
  • Houston
  • Kansas City
  • Los Angeles
  • New York (February 26, 2019)
  • Washington, DC (December 12-13, 2018)
  • Florence, Italy (March 20, 2019)
  • Brighton, Great Britain (February 19, 2019; more details TBA)

If you work in one of these cities and would be interested in hosting a Train the Trainers regional workshop, please contact me, Abby Mullen, at {amullen2 at gmu dot edu}.