Term-Paper Counseling: Individualized Bibliographic Instruction.

Abstract

Term-paper counseling (TPC) as a form of bibliographic instruction has been developed at various universities. At a workshop on library instruction held at the University of Waterloo in 1979, Mary Huston-Miyamoto (then at the University of Illinois) described in detail her experi ence with a program begun in the 1970s; and Juliette Stevens talked about a similar program carried out by library school stu dents at the University of British Colum bia since 1975. In spite of its development, however, there appears to have been little discussion of it in the professional litera ture. A similar program called Library and Research Consultations (LaRC) was described in this journal.1 LaRC is like TPC in that it approaches the student on a one-to-one basis, but it was designed pri marily for graduate students and set up to accommodate them at any time during the year. Term-paper clinics have also been discussed, but these tend to be of a general nature, attempting to give a group of stu dents guidelines for setting up a search strategy in a particular subject area. TPC, on the other hand, is an attempt to match a student's immediate need with