The Role of Libraries in Honors Thesis Research: a Library Credit Course as a Model for Thesis Research Support

Libraries exist to serve both the research and instructional missions of their institutions. Supporting the thesis experience of an honors program represents the perfect convergence of these dual mlSSlOns. The pedagogical mandate for the honors thesis experience is found in the 1998 Boyer Commission Report, Reinventing Undergraduate Education, which calls for undergraduate research experiences that incorporate information literacy as well as more advanced information retrieval competencies. Information Literacy Competency Standards (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2000) describes in detail the specific competencies that are the basis for selecting, evaluating, managing, and using information. The honors thesis is considered to be the capstone undergraduate academic experience. Beyond representing the culmination of course work, it can provide a unique opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary mode. Moreover, it provides acculturation to the academic environment and the opportunity to participate in the scholarly communication process. At the undergraduate level, the significance of the acculturation process is equal to, or more important than, the final thesis product. In addition to mastering subject content, students must learn the fundamentals of designing and executing research. Honors theses share several important characteristics: mentorship, originality, acceptability (consistent with current practice in the discipline), and dissemination (resulting in tangible products critiqued by others in the discipline) (Hakim, 1998). Undergraduate honors theses can take many forms, and the thesis experience can vary greatly from student to student. The primary factor that determines the nature of thesis work is the academic discipline. The significant differences that exist in the conduct of research across the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities are of course reflected in the undergraduate thesis experience as well. In contrast to many subject areas within the social sciences or humanities, students doing thesis work in the hard sciences and those who do creative projects often miss the critical experience of gathering information to establish their research question. Students in the hard sciences most often participate in ongoing research of the mentor, join a research team, and are assigned specific responsibilities in the lab or for particular subsets of data collection and analysis. There are clear advantages to becoming a peer in a research team. But students who participate in such projects often do not have the opportunity to establish their own research problem, determine the evidence required to solve the problem, select their own methodologies and research parameters, or perform their own literature review. The polar …