Reflecting on a Year of Library Teaching

This year the Boston College Libraries have continued to provide an extensive and varied instruction program. From sessions as part of the First Year Writing Seminar to specialized sessions for graduate courses, librarians have offered over 400 instructions sessions that reached a total of over 8,600 attendees since last fall. First Year Writing Seminar accounted for approximately 15% of the sessions and the rest spanned a wide range of other disciplines.

Though the Fall semester is still our busiest time for instruction sessions, this Spring we offered over 200 sessions to a mix of undergraduate, graduate, and PhD audiences as well as several training sessions for faculty. In many cases, library instruction is embedded directly into the course session, but over the course of the year we also offered over 100 sessions in O’Neill Library’s classroom spaces as well as some sessions online. Burns Library staff continued to be important players in our instruction program, offering over 60 sessions this Spring in Burns Library. These sessions allow students a hands-on approach to work with unique materials that the library has to offer.

As always, our instruction sessions also touch on a broad number of information literacy topics, from defining basic research topics, critically thinking about appropriate sources and evaluation  as well as the use of data and GIS tools and resources. If you are interested in adding a library instruction component to your course or would like to know more about our instruction program, please contact your subject librarian for more information.