Knowledge and Networks: Subject Specialists and the Social Library

Abstract

What is the role of the subject specialist in the 21st-century academic library? What value does subject knowledge confer, and how best is such expertise deployed? These questions have been much discussed in academic librarianship, as the emergence of new technologies and services has made the subject expert appear by turns a quaint and dubious creature. Here we propose a distinct approach to this set of issues. As a librarian and an archivist, we offer a joint perspective, starting with the term ‘subject specialist’ itself, which has come simply to connote a liaison librarian even though subject knowledge is often part of an archivist’s training and experience too. The profession tends to locate the subject specialist in a subject-based liaison department, despite the leveraging of subject knowledge by a wide variety of information professionals – liaison librarians, as well as archivists, curators and others – in today’s academic library. We therefore offer an expanded view of subject specialty and focus on the similar ways liaison librarians and archivists use subject knowledge. In particular, we situate our discussion within the frame of social capital theory and we suggest channels whereby subject specialists (a) contribute to the teaching, learning and research missions of their home institutions and (b) create social capital within the library, or in other words across the academic library’s own organisational units.