Investigating The Gap Between Advance Registrations and Attendance At Library Workshops: An Evidence-Based Scheduling Story

One persistent challenge of optional library workshops is that “enrollment and attendance can be unpredictable” (1). Advance registrations are helpful for planning; however, a high proportion of no-show rates can result in wasted efforts. Recommendations can be found in the literature about improving overall attendance numbers. We were interested in investigating whether some of these recommendations, such as concentrating on topics that fulfill niche areas (2) or offering sessions multiple times (1), combined with local context, might influence no-show rates. Noticing the discrepancy between advance registration and attendance numbers for her own workshops in niche areas, one of the co-authors recorded both these numbers over several years. This data story presents a case study into how advance registration and attendance numbers of these 52 workshops (mostly data literacy sessions) could be used to assist with decision-making for instructional programming and scheduling. Regression analysis was conducted to investigate whether there is a relationship between the attendance rates (i.e. show-up rates) of optional library workshops and any of the following explanatory variables: when the workshop was taught, the topic, whether it was a repeat offering, whether other workshops had been offered by the instructor in the previous month, and whether the author’s most popular workshop had been taught in the same month. The methodology presented could offer a useful template for other librarians in their own instructional planning. (1) Schultz, M. K. (2025). What makes students tick? Exploring factors that affect learner motivations and challenges when engaging with optional library workshops on data literacy. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 51(1), 102983. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102983 (2) Witherspoon, R. L., & Taber, P. O. (2021). Increasing student attendance at library workshops: What the data tells us. College & Research Libraries, 82(1), 113-128. http://doi.org/10.5860/crl.82.1.113