About

With support from the Office of the Provost and in keeping with our motto, “Value Beyond Discovery,” Boston College Libraries promote engagement with Catholic collections, facilitate collaboration between institutions and scholars, and encourage 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 involvement from other institutions, individual scholars, and archivists as we aim for our:

• Travel grants to facilitate the use of rich but neglected archival collections.
• Digital projects to be innovative, collaborative, and far-reaching.
• Events to provide spaces to share works in progress and foster collegiality. 
• Publishing support, done through open access and subvention of costs, to impact 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.