Abstract
The Library Research Scholars program pairs librarian faculty mentors with undergraduates on a yearlong journey of engaging with research and creating an intellectual product on a topic of their own devising. Each librarian mentor is paired with a Library Research Scholar whose research area of interest coincides with the librarian’s own area of expertise. As mentors, librarians work actively to guide their mentees through an open-ended, research inquiry process. Librarian faculty members from all departments of the library, including Technical Services, have served as mentors to Library Research Scholars. Librarian faculty mentors guide Research Scholars through a process of discovery. While Research Scholars enter the program with an idea of the topic they would like to explore, that idea becomes refined, reformulated, and fine-tuned over the course of the academic year with the help of a librarian mentor. From oral histories that celebrate the stories of a university’s LGBT community, to plays written about a city’s founders, librarian faculty mentors have guided their Research Scholars through the collaborative, open-ended research inquiry process that is inherent in the development of complex research projects. Many of the resulting scholarly projects exemplify critical engagement with archives, general collections, and community research. Through mentoring and modeling, Library Research & Adobe Scholars build scholarly habits outside of the traditional classroom to support their lifelong learning habits of mind.