About

Boston College Libraries, with support from the Office of the Provost, seeks to encourage scholarly inquiry of the Catholic Church, its history, its institutions, and its people. In keeping with a motto of “Value Beyond Discovery,” BC Libraries offers several initiatives to encourage widespread engagement with the Catholic collections at Boston College and Beyond, to facilitate collaboration between institutions and scholars, and generally to promote research on the Catholic Church.

This Catholic research programming involves the expertise of staff members in the Libraries’ departments Digital Production and Digital Scholarship and at the Burns Library, O’Neill Library, and the Theological and Ministry Library. On-campus partners contribute to those research initiatives as well, such as the undergraduate students associated with the Boisi Center for Religion & American Public Life, along with the Church in the 21st Century (C21) Center, the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy, the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, the Institute for the Liberal Arts, the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, the Roche Center for Catholic Education, and other institutes, departments, and individuals.

We welcome similar involvement with other institutions and individual scholars and archivists in these efforts. We hope our travel grants facilitate the use of rich but neglected archival collections. We intend for our digital projects to be innovative and collaborative to far-reaching scholarly inquiry and to reveal unique insights. We envision our events to provide spaces to share works in progress and foster collegiality. And we aim to facilitate – through open access and subvention of publication costs – the impact of new Catholic research. 

These initiatives are coordinated by Thomas B. Wall, University Librarian, and Seth Meehan, department of academic programming and special projects. To learn more, please explore our website and contact us at librariescatholicresearch@bc.edu.