Subject Librarians: Engaging with the Learning and Teaching Environment

Citation

Rolfe, P. (2007), "Subject Librarians: Engaging with the Learning and Teaching Environment", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 5, pp. 421-423. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710750635

Subject librarianship is a topic that attracts much controversy at the present time. Things vary from place to place, and at times worrying trends seem to be emerging. 2005 was the worst of times to be a subject librarian, at least in University of Wales Bangor. Whereas some universities had been gradually and stealthily dispensing with subject librarians, Bangor decided to do so openly and at a stroke, to replace them with something it called “new technology”, and thereby save £300,000 per year. Bangor's claim that it would also improve services to users was widely believed to be implausible.

2005 was also the best of times. News of Bangor's plans spread throughout the world of higher education – “new technology” was useful here – and a level of publicity was achieved for Bangor that any university marketing officer might envy. The responses to the plan, and the protests it engendered were, one supposes, more gratifying to librarians than they were to Bangor's managers. The dust has now settled, but, as this collection of essays demonstrates, subject librarians are far from being a disappearing species. In some universities they are still a valued part of the academic team and are “contributing significantly to the enhancement of the Higher Education learning environment” (xiii).

Subject Librarians is not a “how to do it” book, and for the most part does not give practical advice on how to carry out the daily work of a subject librarian. It will, however, suggest to the reflective practitioner many avenues which need to be explored in order to engage successfully with, in the words of the sub‐title, “the learning and teaching environment”, and to adapt to changes which will inevitably occur, both in the structure of higher education and in the subject matter of librarianship.

Between them the contributors draw on an extensive range of experience, reflecting the diversity of subject librarian work in higher education in the UK and overseas. Their essays are grouped in three sections:

Part 1, The Subject Specialist in Higher Education begins with a review of the literature, and covers the development of the subject librarian from being a subject scholar to having an intermediary role as enabler and educator, and reassuringly, “a coherent thread of continuity between past, present and future is clearly identifiable” (p. 14).

Some of the succeeding chapters cover fairly circumscribed topics such as the work of the Quality Assurance Agency; the use of virtual learning environments in Higher Education; the provision of higher education in a further education institute. Here I was left wondering why higher education was provided in a place that was not designed for it, and whether what was provided really was higher education. The remaining chapters in this section, Learning and Teaching, Professional Engagement and Changing Relationships in the University enable their authors to consider broad themes in a discursive and thought‐provoking manner, though one conclusion I simply found baffling was: “Perhaps [teaching in higher education] has adapted, kept up, got better and does more, but it is relatively and essentially unchanging” (p. 60).

Part 2, Serving Different Constituencies has a chapter on undergraduates, and gives an account of the information literacy training programme developed at Newcastle University Library, and based on SCONUL's “Seven Pillars of Information Literacy” model. This is followed by chapters on asynchronous learning – defined as, “where the primary method of teaching is not dependent on traditional contact time on campus” (p. 118) – researchers and international students. These groups are of course neither mutually exclusive nor internally homogenous, and the chapter on international students has the welcome, though one would have thought unnecessary, observation, “It should not be assumed that all international students are alike” (p. 152). The whole section is a reminder of the increasing diversity of library users which has resulted from the widening of participation in higher education and the necessity for universities to attract and recruit students rather than merely select them.

Part 3, International Perspectives gives a brief review of the literature of library support in Africa, Asia and Australia, and this is followed by a more detailed study of developments in Southern Africa.

Some of the book's contemporary terminology can be slightly irritating: “on‐campus” used as a noun, I think, “drivers”, “24/7”. Some confusion surrounds the term “redbrick” in Chapter 10, and there is the occasional passage where a little more proof‐reading would have been useful. But all these are outweighed by the clearest and most succinct statement of the need for subject librarians: “the information skills needs of a cohort of undergraduate engineers differs (sic) significantly from those of a corresponding group of fine arts students” (p. 114). The collection as a whole demonstrates the centrality of subject librarians to the academic enterprise and should be read by any subject librarian suffering from low professional self‐esteem, or by any university manager who believes that subject librarians are a waste of public money.