Brown Bag Lunch Series is designed to provide a forum for an intellectual exchange of ideas pertaining to an area of scholarship, including but not limited to a research issue or project. 

Please contact Office for Nursing Research at 2-3123 for additional information.

The Boston College Nursing Library collection in the Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr., Library has long been recognized for its comprehensive coverage of nursing and allied literature. The collection numbers more than 57,000 volumes and contains close to 700 subscriptions to health care periodicals. It includes current subscriptions to and complete backfiles of all nursing periodicals in English and foreign languages, and many other related periodicals in medicine, bioethics, medical sociology, psychiatry, public health, and social sciences, as well as National Health Planning Information Center materials, dissertations about or by nurses, and the collections of several nurse leaders including a 1966 American Nurses' Foundation study by Dr. Vern Pings, A Plan for Indexing the Periodical Literature of Nursing, and in the International Encyclopedia of Libraries and Librarianship in the chapter "Nursing Libraries" by J. Picciano, 1977. Virginia Henderson, research associate emeritus of Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, wrote that she considered the collection "to be the best nursing library in this or any country I have visited" (letter to Barbara Madden, April 6, 1983).

Nursing faculty take pride in the nursing collection. Complete files of all nursing indices, bibliographies, and reference books and selected major indices in related fields are included.

The Boston College Library System, a member of the  Association of Research Libraries (ARL) (comprised of 123 leading research libraries in North America), at present contains over 2 million printed volumes, 20,000 online journals, and 3.9 million microform units, plus serials, government documents, video and sound recordings, and digital resources available both on-site and remotely. It is at the forefront of the implementation of technology with an integrated automated library system of online catalog holdings, computerized acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, reserves, interlibrary loans, and bibliographic searching.  Cooperative agreements with other academic and research libraries in the Boston area effectively expand the resources by over 25 million volumes and include the collections from the Boston Public Library, Boston University, Brandeis, Brown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Tufts University, University of Massachusetts, and Wellesley College (BC Libraries Guide, 2006).

QUEST, the Libraries’ web-based integrated system, provides convenient access to the Libraries’ collections, digital resources, and services. It offers a variety of methods for finding books, periodicals, media resources, government documents, microforms, newspapers, and electronic materials, allowing access to services on the web 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (see BC Factbook 2006-2007 for additional information). BC Libraries also offer access to a rich collection of electronic databases and journals. The more than 300 databases include full text access to thousands of books and journals directly from the researcher’s desktop. The eScholarship@BC Digital Repository is a central online system, the goal of which is to preserve the University’s scholarly output. The repository manages submission, access, distribution, and preservation of scholarly information in digital formats. It maximizes research visibility, influence, and benefit by encouraging Boston College authors to archive and distribute online both unpublished and peer-reviewed publications in an open-access environment. It includes scholarly peer-reviewed electronic journals, archived peer-reviewed articles, conference proceedings, working papers, dissertations and theses, conference websites, and like scholarship. See http://escholarship.bc.edu/

The Boston College Nursing Library collection has long been recognized for its breadth and depth of coverage of nursing literature. The health collection has over 65,000 volumes and the nursing collection has over 20,000 volumes and contains approximately 5,395 health care related periodical titles of which there are 3,223 e-journals. There are 967 nursing journals in print and/or online. The Nursing Library collection has the prestige of being the Nursing Resource Library for the National Library of Medicine’s National Network of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region. The collection includes current subscriptions and backfiles to many nursing periodicals in English and foreign languages, plus many other related periodicals in medicine, bioethics, medical sociology, psychiatry, public health, and social sciences. There are complete files of most nursing indices, bibliographies, reference books and selected major indices in related fields. The Nursing Library microforms collection includes materials archiving more than 7000 dissertations by or about nurses. Dissertations from 1997 to the present are available full-text online. 

An analysis primarily of the nursing book collection using World Cat Analysis data indicated that the it surpassed several designated peer groups both for nursing books and serials. An Ulrich’s periodical evaluation indicated the same result. New tenure-track faculty are granted $2500 of the Nursing Fund budget to request books in their research areas. Faculty input to the library occurs through individual faculty requests, through the Faculty Affairs Committee, and through the CSON Faculty Library Liaison.

Services offered by the Nursing/Health Sciences Librarian include collection development, library instruction in the uses of print and electronic resources and databases, and reference and consultation services. Assistance is available from Wanda Anderson, CT(ASCP), M.S., Ed.M., the current Subject Specialist for Nursing, for one-on-one research consultation and online computer searching. Library updates are regularly sent to faculty in addition to  online alert services  for current research available by email subscription.

The John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections houses the Nursing Archives and the Mary Pekarski Memorial Nursing Archives, named in memory of the founding librarian of the nursing collections at Boston College. It contains one of the finest collections of nursing records in the nation, specializing in the history of nursing and in health care ethics. It includes the papers of several leading nurse historians, including Dr. Josephine Dolan, Dean Rita P. Kelleher, Sister Madeleine Clemence Vaillot, O.P., and Dr. Margaret Colliton. It also includes the archives of the New England Deaconess Hospital School of Nursing, North American Nursing Diagnosis Association (NANDA), and The American Association of Nurse Attorneys (TAANA). Additional resources include the School of Social Work Library (housed in McGuinn Hall) and the Law School Library.

CERes (Colleagues Enhancing Research) panel is a peer review panel for faculty grant applications and for students submitting NRSA grant applications. The group meets monthly and offers several different format options, including the NIH format of a Study Section Meeting, Specific Aims & Input, Specific Aims Studio, and Study Concepts Think Tank. Reviews may be open or closed based on the preferences of the submitting investigator. Panel members are solicited by ONR. Faculty members submitting external grant applications and students submitting NRSAs are encouraged to utilize the CERes peer review process prior to grant submission. Faculty members interested in using the expertise of CERes should complete and submit the CERes Review Request Google Form as soon as possible to book a review (first-come, first-served). Faculty who are submitting for a CERes review should submit an original application and sponsor request for application (if applicable) to the ONR (Maloney Hall 226) prior to the posted deadline. Additionally, faculty in the early stages of writing may submit a specific aims page for a CERes Lite review. The format of this review is in open discussion form. It is important to coordinate proposal submissions with CERes meetings so there is ample time to make proposal revisions based on panel reviews.

PASS (Peers Advancing Science and Scholarship) is a group designed for untenured tenure-track faculty members to provide support in navigating the development of an academic research trajectory. The group meets approximately twice a month during the academic year.