Back to School Top Tips for Librarians and Institutional IT
Kate · September 15, 2020It’s that time of year again when many of us return to work, in a year that has already been different in so many unprecedented ways. Many of us are looking at a future of remote learning/working, which can leave some feeling unsure and unprepared for the year ahead.
To help reduce some of that uncertainty, we've collated together some of our favorite learning tools, help topics and fun content to help you perfect (and enjoy) your return to work! We know you don’t have time to learn new tools - so we’ve split the content below into items just for you, and then items you can share with your colleagues and students.
Happy TeXing!
- Just For You
- Overleaf Libguides
- Top 5 Q&A: Supporting Innovative Writing & Publishing Platforms for Students, Faculty and Staff
- Strategies for Funding Scholarly Authorship Services on your Campus
- Understand how Overleaf can help you and your institution
- Institutional subscriptions and discounts
- Things To Share
Just For You
Overleaf Libguides
Check out our Overleaf Libguides portal we put together with the help of Helen Josephine, former Head of the Terman Engineering Library at Stanford. The Overleaf Libguides provides a wide assortment of content which can help with:
- Informing students and faculty about all the great features of Overleaf.
- Curating and disseminating links to a wide range of helpful LaTeX resources.
We are always adding new information to this portal, so why not check it out, and bookmark it so it’s easily accessible to use and share.
Top 5 Q&A: Supporting Innovative Writing & Publishing Platforms for Students, Faculty and Staff
Whilst the original article might be two years old, the top 5 questions & answers covered by Shelly are still relevant today, and are often asked repeatedly. Discover the answers to the following questions:
- How are libraries funding, supporting, & promoting innovative scholarly authoring & publishing tools?
- Do these innovative tools align with other services?
- Why use a cloud-based LaTeX editor?
- Why write in LaTeX?
- How do you pronounce LaTeX?
in the full blog post.
Strategies for Funding Scholarly Authorship Services on your Campus
With many of you meeting reduced budgets, we wanted to share with you a set of strategies for funding scholarly authorship services on your campus. Whilst the original blog post was written in 2017, many of the strategies stand strong today, including:
- Working with the graduate office or dissertation office to help alleviate confusion or frustration underlying the dissertation or thesis submission process.
- Use journal templates on Overleaf to help improve student writing and article submissions.
- Get help from the IT or Campus Technology departments with licence funding for tools like Overleaf.
- Work with the Schools of Engineering or departments of Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Biology, Statistics et al, whose projects require numerical formulae or scientific notation, to fund an institution-wide Overleaf licence or group account.
Read the full article.
Understand how Overleaf can help you and your institution
In July, Dr John Hammersley, co-founder and CEO of Overleaf, discussed the origins of Overleaf and how it's being used successfully at universities and institutions worldwide.
You can watch a recording of this webinar or join John live on October 15th 2020 where you can ask your own questions and hear first hand how Purdue Graduate School saved time by eliminating 1,000 meetings a year by using Overleaf!
Register Now
Overleaf for Institutions - 15 October 2020 - 9am PT/11am ET/3pm BST
Institutional subscriptions and discounts
Hopefully our topics above will save you some time, now it’s time to save you some money!
Did you know that we can offer your institution a great deal on an institution-wide licence with Overleaf Commons, or if you’re a smaller team/department you can take advantage of our Overleaf Group licences which have a 40% discount for educational use.
Alternatively, you or your students can sign up for a personal subscription, and until 30 September 2020 we’re offering a special work-from-home discount which saves you 30% on our annual plans!
We’ve written the content below in such a way as to make it simple to copy, paste and share with your students and colleagues if you'd like to!
Get ahead and learn some LaTeX
From beginner to advanced Overleaf user in bite-size pieces!
Webinars On Demand
Check out the on-demand webinars from Overleaf covering beginner, intermediate and advanced Overleaf features - watch all of them or pick & choose which you want to watch!
- Intro to Overleaf Part I : Beginner Features (30 minutes)
- Intro to Overleaf Part II : Intermediate Features (30 minutes)
- Intro to Overleaf Part III : Advanced Features (1 hour)
Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes guide
If you’d rather follow a structured written guide and work along with some examples in Overleaf, then check out our Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes course. The guide aims to give you your first introduction to LaTeX and does not require any prior knowledge of LaTeX—but by the time you are finished you’ll have written your first LaTeX documents, and have a good knowledge of some of the basic functions provided by LaTeX.
Introduction to LaTeX Three Part Course
We’ve also got our free online introduction to LaTeX three-part course, written by one of our founders Dr John D Lees-Miller, which is available online in slide format and as a downloadable PDF. Perfect if you have never used LaTeX before, or if it has been a while and you would like a refresher course.
Top tips for staying organized
With remote teaching comes the need to stay organized, both physically and mentally in your home work space, as well as virtually across your various dashboards and work environments.
Overleaf have pulled together their top tips to kick start your return to work on the right foot, whether you are working on your assignments, group projects, class content or your own projects.