McMillen, Paula

CommonKnowledge

Volume 12 , Number 2
Children's Literature: The Oregon Way (Summer 2006) | Pages 14 - 15
July 2014
A Therapeutic Collaboration: The Bibliotherapy
Education Project at Oregon State University
Paula McMillen
Oregon State University
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OLA Quarterly is an official publication of the Oregon Library Association | ISSN 1093-7374 | http://commons.pacificu.edu/olaq
McMillen, P. (2014). A Therapeutic Collaboration: The Bibliotherapy Education Project at Oregon State University. OLA Quarterly,
12(2), 14-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.7710/1093-7374.1116
 14
In this article I hope to brieﬂ y intro-duce the concept and practice of bibliotherapy and then describe the 
development and current state of a biblio-
therapy resource page, developed jointly 
by faculty at the Oregon State University 
(OSU) Libraries and School of Education. 
I’m currently a social science reference 
librarian at OSU with responsibilities for 
Education, Psychology and Sociology as 
well as the Children’s book collection.
Bibliotherapy has been deﬁ ned many 
ways and is known by many other names 
such as biblioguidance, literatherapy, 
reading therapy, bibliocounseling, biblio-
psychology, book matching and literapeu-
tics. Most simply, if one goes back to the 
Greek roots of the word, it means helping 
through books. It has been used with all 
ages, with almost every imaginable issue 
or problem, and at all levels of interven-
tion by teachers, counselors, librarians, 
social workers, nurses, psychologists and 
physicians. Developmental bibliotherapy, 
for example, can be used in the classroom 
where the goal may be to facilitate normal 
developmental passages or to educate 
about attitudes, feelings and behaviors. 
Clinical bibliotherapy usually involves 
trained mental health or healthcare praciti-
tioners using books as a way to stimulate 
discussion of difﬁ cult feelings or facilitate 
resolution of more signiﬁ cant behavioral 
and emotional issues. It is seldom used 
alone, but more typically in combina-
tion with discussion or other follow-up 
activities that promote the psychological 
processes of identiﬁ cation, catharsis and 
insight.
Our project at OSU started as a routine 
request for a library session with gradu-
ate counseling students in the Winter term 
of 2000, but it has grown into an ongoing 
collaboration with much broader reach 
and appeal. With my background in clini-
cal psychology, I was excited to help my 
colleague in the Counselor Education De-
partment at OSU, Dr. Dale Pehrsson, and 
work with her students on using books in 
therapeutic settings. We began exploring 
the professional literature around biblio-
therapy, initially to gather information on 
what recommendations practitioners made 
about evaluating books for use, and what 
the research said about the beneﬁ ts and 
efﬁ cacy of using books therapeutically. We 
created the ﬁ rst draft of an evaluation tool 
based on our ﬁ ndings, using a paper and 
pencil format, to guide graduate students 
through the process of evaluating primarily 
children’s books to use in therapy. 
When we took our project to the joint 
OLA/WLA conference in Portland in April 
2002, we were somewhat surprised to ﬁ nd 
that what we had previously considered a 
good demonstration of interdepartmental 
collaboration in an academic setting actu-
ally drew more interest from the public 
librarians than academic ones. We were 
pleased that librarians were interested in 
our project, especially because libraries 
serve as such a great source of reading 
material for teachers, mental health work-
ers and parents who are trying to help 
children and young adults with issues. 
Not surprisingly, librarians were the ﬁ rst 
partners with healthcare professionals in 
using books therapeutically in the early 
1900s; it’s only in the last few decades that 
the dominant discussion of bibliotherapy 
has shifted from the library and medi-
cal literature to that of mental health and 
education.
Dr. Pehrsson and I had discussed the 
possibility of creating a database of the 
graduate students’ evaluations so that stu-
dents in subsequent classes could take ad-
vantage of this collected wisdom. With our 
new awareness of potentially broader in-
terest in this information, we felt the opti-
mal way to improve accessibility would be 
to put it on the Web. We applied for and 
received two small teaching improvement 
grants (OSU L.L.Stewart) which helped 
us hire some student technical expertise 
to move this idea into reality. We discov-
ered in the process that we would have to 
signiﬁ cantly revise the evaluation tool to 
by Paula McMillen, Ph.D.
Oregon State University Libraries
Assoc. Professor & Social Science 
Librarian
A Therapeutic Collaboration:
The Bibliotherapy Education Project at Oregon State University
 15
  V o l  1 2  N o  2  •  S U M M E R  2 0 0 6
make it compatible with a Web-based form 
and searchable database. Our interdisci-
plinary team of library technology, library 
intern, computer science, graphic arts and 
counseling students helped us realize our 
initial goal of creating an online form with 
a searchable database of the resulting 
evaluations.
We have continued to expand and 
update the Web site, now called the Biblio-
therapy Education Project © (http://biblio-
therapy.library.oregonstate.edu). In addi-
tion to the Bibliotherapy Evaluation Tool 
©, we now link to book ﬁ nding resources, 
information about the project, and about 
our own research and teaching related 
to bibliotherapy. We also include brief 
descriptions of student research projects 
at OSU that have involved bibliotherapy. 
Although we began with a focus on 
children’s books, our future plans include 
greater coverage of resources for young 
adults, adults and multicultural materials. 
The database of book evaluations has been 
expanded by each new class of graduate 
counselor education students at OSU and 
at other institutions with programs in coun-
seling, notably Texas A & M at Texarkana. 
We’ve also had inquiries from students do-
ing research on aspects of bibliotherapy in 
several countries including Canada, Taiwan 
and South America. 
OSU Libraries management and the 
OSU School of Education have supported 
the project in many ways. The Library 
Technology department provides the server 
space and technical oversight for the Web 
site. My work schedule has been accom-
modated to allow me to do graduate work 
in children’s and young adult literature at 
Portland State University. This has enriched 
our bibliotherapy research and my ability 
to build a better collection of children’s 
and young adult books in the library; obvi-
ously an improved collection better pro-
vides for our curriculum and students, and 
even enables new classes. I’ll be teaching a 
graduate course in multicultural children’s 
literature for educators and counselors this 
summer, which is the ﬁ rst time the course 
has been offered in many years. 
We encourage you to explore and use 
the Bibliotherapy Education Project© Web 
site. The searchable database of book eval-
uations and the resource links are all freely 
available. To view the Bibliotherapy Evalu-
ation Tool© or use it to review a book, 
you do ﬁ rst need to complete a short form 
to become a reviewer. There’s a link to 
contact us at the bottom of the home page 
and my co-founder and I would love to 
hear your reactions and ideas to make this 
a better resource. 
For more information about the proj-
ect, or scholarly explorations of bibliother-
apy and reviews of the literature, follow 
the links from “About the project” or see 
the following resources:
McMillen, P. (2005). The Bibliotherapy 
Education Project: A collaborative teach-
ing effort goes to the Web. Behavioral and 
Social Sciences Librarian, 23(2), 85-96.
McMillen, P. & Pehrsson, D.E. (2004). 
Speciality of the house: Bibliotherapy 
for hospital patients. Journal of Hospital 
Librarianship, 4(1), 73-82.
Pehrsson, D. and McMillen, P. (2005). A 
bibliotherapy evaluation tool: Ground-
ing counselors in the therapeutic use of 
literature. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 32(1), 
47–59.
Paula McMillen has a doctoral de-
gree in clinical psychology as well as her 
master’s degree in library science. Her 
professional experience includes over 20 
years in various mental health and health 
care settings. She is currently an Associate 
Professor in the Oregon State University 
Libraries and a social sciences reference 
librarian.


A Therapeutic Collaboration: The Bibliotherapy Education Project at Oregon State University

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