Introduction

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.

Our chapter first places subject specialty in historical perspective before then considering some 21st-century job trends and relevant professional literature. Ultimately, we draw on our own experiences in outreach, instruction and collection development in order to try to offer a fresh perspective on subject expertise, and to propose the value of subject knowledge for the social future of academic libraries.

The social location of subject experts in the academic library

Notions of social capital and studies seeking to elaborate it have proliferated since the 1990s. Definitions are forthcoming from multiple disciplines, but especially – and sometimes dissonantly – from economics and management, political science and sociology. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2009) draws on all of these fields when it defines social capital as ‘the interpersonal networks and common civic values which influence the infrastructure and economy of a particular society; the nature, extent, or value of these’.