Subject Librarians: Engaging with the Learning and Teaching Environment

Citation

Bernath, V. (2007), "Subject Librarians: Engaging with the Learning and Teaching Environment", Library Management, Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. 173-173. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120710728027

Librarians in higher education with responsibility for a particular discipline or subject area are the primary focus of this book. The contributors are mainly librarians from the United Kingdom where subject librarians may also be called subject specialists, liaison librarians, information advisors or tutor librarians. Subject librarians are described as linking the library with academics, students and the wider world of information.

Factors such as the increasingly electronic nature of scholarly communication and the growing ease of unmediated access to information, accompanied by the massification of education, have had great impact on the roles of subject librarians over the past decade. This collection aims to provide perspectives that “encourage discussion and reflection on the way that the role is developing”.

The intended audience includes librarians, other student support staff and especially library and information science students. The accounts would also be informative to people from other sectors moving into libraries in higher education.

Various aspects of subject librarians' changing roles and relationships in higher education are explored. Examples include involvement with online learning, international students, undergraduates, researchers and collaborative opportunities provided by increasing emphasis on accountability and quality assurance. These case studies stem mainly from English universities, with two additional chapters about subject librarians in further education and in Southern African university libraries.

A useful review of the literature provides the background to the changing roles of today's subject librarians, and many of the chapters also provide extensive reference lists, generally not going beyond 2004. There are some minor editing slips, and an error in at least one reference (Rieger et al., page 88, should be issue 3). Any update to this publication might best be made as a special issue to an appropriate journal so that entries could be more easily discovered by the people most likely to use them. Subject librarians' involvement in research into the effectiveness of the many activities described would be a useful additional perspective to explore.