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The subject librarian as a cultural ambassador: an Australian librarian in London.

Article Excerpt
In Information Studies literature there is debate about the future of the 'subject librarian' as the increasing sophistication of electronic search devices leaves readers progressively more capable of seeking and interpreting information independently. As a case study, however, this essay will look at one such library professional, the curator for the Australian collection at the British Library, and question the impact of the absence of that role on public interaction with the Library's Australian material. It will be shown that the role of the subject librarian will necessarily be reinterpreted in future, but that subject specialists still play an important role as 'ambassadors' for the collections they represent.

Introduction

The subject specialist, in the context of librarianship, has traditionally been responsible for some or all tasks associated with the selection, exploitation and conservation of a specific subsection of a library collection: covering a geographical area, for example, or a particular discipline. The routine, practical elements of this role might appear in the job description, but what sometimes goes unwritten is the tremendous power and significance of the subject librarian in terms of being a gatekeeper of information. In particular, in the case of a geographical/language specialist, this librarian will also act as a translator and ambassador for his/her area of specialisation.

With this in mind, the subject librarian might seem an indispensable component of any larger library team. However in Information Studies literature there is much debate: does a librarian need to have a strong subject background to provide a quality service? Or is the 'disintermediation' of information (Rodwell 2001), whereby users help themselves to information via search engines and databases, resulting in potentially less need for subject expertise? The skills required of information professionals may be moving towards an emphasis on training, information literacy and business management, but what does this mean for the cultural gatekeeper component of their roles?

This essay will examine the literature about subject librarians in two parts: first looking at the question of practicality in terms of the changing needs of library users, and then looking at the role of libraries in representation of culture. As a focus, the role of the curator for Australian material at the British Library ('curator' being the preferred job title for subject specialists at that institution) will be examined, using the author's personal experience, to explore the potentially ambassadorial role of being a subject librarian for Australian library holdings in an international environment. This essay will conclude that the ways in which Australian collections outside of Australia are selected, marketed and managed may impact on international understandings of Australian literature and culture: a dedicated 'Australianist' in this circumstance will affect the ways in which the library presents Australia to users. Whether or not these kinds of subject librarians continue to exist in library teams, it is important to consider within the debate this under-examined dimension of their role.

History and theory

Subject librarians have probably always existed in the sense that specialist collectors have always operated as mediators between texts and those with an interest in them. As a named species, however, the subject librarian gained widespread credibility as an essential link in the library team chain as libraries underwent major review, expansion and formalisation in the 1960s and '70s (Bluck 1996, p.94). Bloomfield (1988) reports a period of growth in North American universities from the 1950s, when university libraries became inadequate in meeting the needs of an increased population of teachers and students and a wider range of subjects studied. Libraries were faced with a choice between spending a lot of money to collect comprehensively, hoping to meet these new user demands through the sheer volume of acquired resources, or hiring specialists to monitor and respond to these growth patterns. A parallel increase in the volume of available publications created difficulties for other kinds of libraries: national libraries, for example, grew more selective about their intake of material other than that acquired by legal deposit.

The subject librarian was born out of this need to collect selectively, going hand in hand with the notion of strategic collection development, as opposed to the view of a library as a 'passive storehouse of knowledge acquiring materials by a gradual process of uncontrolled accretion' (Bloomfield 1988, p.99). The developments in North America produced a ripple effect and subject librarians were soon widely employed to deal with selection and enquiry work, and progressively took on management, public relations and information skills teaching for specific user groups (Bluck 1996). Somehow, though, by the late 1970s, information theorists were already beginning to question the future of this endangered breed (Dickinson, 1978, refers to subject librarians as 'dinosaurs'), as information began to be transmitted and stored in new ways.

The amount of information produced is increasing, the pace of technological change shows no sign of slowing, and user expectations are now higher than ever. In some cases, user expectations have risen in accordance with changed perceptions of who now funds library services; fee-paying students or the tax-paying public may perceive a right to demand greater accountability from library services....

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