The Companion Course: A Pilot Project to Teach Discipline‐Specific Library Research Skills Available to Purchase

In early 1997, fueled by reports from the university administration of declining enrollments and student retention problems, the University of Oregon Library System formed a task force to explore opportunities to boost student retention. The most popular recommendation from the task force was to develop library courses that would address discipline‐specific information needs in a number of library‐intensive courses, especially in journalism, management, psychology, and women’s studies. In this article, Bell and Benedicto discuss the pilot program that arose out of this recommendation and that was conducted over spring term 1998.