Spring 2026 Report: Research and Instruction

Consultations

From January to May, we had 113 individual consultations with students, faculty, and staff. The areas of academic support requested during these meetings were remarkably diverse, spanning several key discipline clusters:

• Education Policy & Practice: Sessions focused heavily on literacy reform, multilingual education, school safety dynamics (e.g., metal detectors and safety officers), and the "school-to-prison pipeline." There was also a recurring emphasis on the integration of diverse curricular perspectives, education in emergency contexts, and the unique academic experiences of marginalized student populations.
• Psychology & Mental Health: Queries addressed a broad array of clinical and counseling topics. These included trauma-informed care, substance abuse prevention (focusing on opioids and vaping), anxiety management in middle schoolers, and neuroimaging methodologies for ADHD and autism. Additionally, many consultations explored the distinct mental health needs of specific demographics, such as Black women, immigrants, and musicians.
• Organizational Coaching & Leadership: In continuous support of the Columbia Coaching Certification program, a significant portion of inquiries involved leadership development, coaching presence, and establishing "coaching cultures" within high-pressure professional environments like law firms, financial institutions, and non-profits. These topics frequently intersected with burnout prevention, resilience, and navigating complex corporate cultures.
• Arts, Technology, & Society: Several scholars explored the intersection of art education with modern technology—including AI and digital storytelling—the role of museums as community support spaces, and the utilization of artistic mediums to process complex social and philosophical concepts.
• Research Methodology: A substantial volume of consultations provided strict methodological guidance. Students sought advice on structuring systematic and scoping reviews, executing qualitative methods (such as autoethnography and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis), and utilizing specialized research tools like Zotero and Covidence for literature management.

Workshops

Gottesman Libraries continues to offer two regularly recurring workshop tracks tailored to different stages of the research lifecycle. Charting Your Path is a five-part foundational series that introduces graduate students to essential library ecosystems, core search strategies, and baseline toolkits. Building on those fundamentals, the Elevate Your Research series introduces advanced, deep-dive methodologies and collaborative software required to handle heavy research data.

In total, the library hosted 29 research workshops this semester. These sessions brought in 146 total attendees, averaging roughly 5 participants per session, with highly attended core workshops reaching upwards of 21 registrants.

Information Sessions

The Spring semester also featured eight specialized information sessions delivering targeted instruction to a total of 140 students. Arranged by faculty request to meet the specific demands of course assignments, these sessions yielded several highlights this term. Notably, I joined Professor John Allegrante’s Doctoral Thesis Seminar to provide advanced guidance on systematic review methodologies and academic resources. Additionally, mirroring a successful initiative from last year, the library provided a dedicated research presentation and facility tour for local high schoolers participating in Cyphers for Justice—a youth participatory action research project based out of Teachers College.

Research Guides

The Library’s 68 research guides continue to be an important resource for learning what resources are available, as well as how to use them. We continue to update the guides to stay current with the information needs of TC. For instance, we have added new resources to our Open Scholarship guide that are free and open Lesson Plans and Primary Source Classroom Materials.

Reference Tickets

Beyond face-to-face instruction, the library managed 119 reference tickets from students, faculty, alumni, and Columbia/Barnard affiliates, successfully closing out nearly the entire volume by the end of the term. The largest percentage of these inquiries involved assisting patrons in locating, accessing, or acquiring specific research articles and digital PDFs for course work and upcoming publications. The remaining queue was dedicated to system authentication and proxy-login troubleshooting, physical book and historical dissertation discovery, and targeted database navigation.

Congratulations to all of our Spring 2026 graduates! It has been a pleasure to support students grow as scholars, researchers, and educators.