Liaison to academic departments remains one of the most common functions of today’s academic libraries (Johnson, 2018). Also referred to as ‘subject specialist, subject librarian, academic liaison, subject liaison, liaison librarian, and subject bibliographer’ liaison librarians have traditionally assisted students, faculty, and staff in assigned academic departments with materials, research, and instructional needs (Church-Duran, 2017, p. 258). In addition to providing these critical services to their constituents, liaisons constitute the public face of the library, offering opportunities to publicize library facilities, resources, and services. However, faculty and students’ needs have continuously expanded and changed to include support for data management, copyright, document repository, and open educational resources (OER’s). Academic libraries have enlisted a variety of strategies to support these requirements, but the extent to which library and information science (LIS) master’s-level programs have evolved to support the expanded educational needs of students preparing for careers as academic library liaisons is unclear.

As educating future library professionals remain a core function of American Library Association (ALA)-accredited master’s degree programs, there is sustained interest in exploring the extent to which these programs are preparing students for employment in today’s libraries. Recent research has explored library professionals’ impressions of the preparation they received for work in areas including technical services (Smith, et al., 2024), data management (Luo and Tang, 2024; Thomas and Urban, 2018), liaison to academic departments (Bright and Colón-Aguirre, 2022), and special collections and rare book cataloguing (Hertenstein, 2023). Findings from such studies provide useful guidance for continued evolution of LIS education as they sketch a realistic picture of the skills and knowledge required for specific specializations.

This paper reports on findings from a survey of academic librarians with liaison responsibilities to college and university humanities departments. The survey included questions about both typical and non-traditional liaison responsibilities. Respondents who indicated responsibility for specific duties were also asked to evaluate the preparation for those tasks afforded them in both their ALA- accredited master’s and, where applicable, other graduate degree programs (a small number of respondents indicated not having enrolled in an ALA-accredited master’s or being in the process of earning the degree). This area of questioning is this paper’s focus, and therefore reports on the sub-set of survey respondents who have completed an ALA-accredited master’s degree and indicated responsibility for the tasks discussed here.

This paper builds upon the tradition of research into librarians’ opinions about the extent to which graduate education prepared them for their work by reporting on a survey of academic library liaisons to humanities and social sciences academic departments. Notably, the survey is concerned primarily with liaisons’ preparation for several areas of librarianship typically assigned to functional specialists, described by one respondent as a ‘Mulligan’s stew.’ These can be grouped under the broad categories of data management, assessment, and scholarly communications. Wishing to test our hypothesis that librarians assigned as liaisons to humanities and social sciences departments might not have received academic preparation in these areas, we distributed survey invitations to librarians who 1) are listed as humanities department liaisons on the web directories of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions in the United States, and/or 2) are listed as humanities department liaisons on the web directories of colleges and universities identified by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as home institutions of recipients of one or more NEH Office of digital humanities awards made between 2011 and 2024.

This paper focuses on one dimension of the survey: questions about respondents’ perceptions of the extent to which their graduate education prepared them for several areas of liaison work as identified in previous surveys of liaison librarians (Bishop, et al., 2023) and working documents, such as the University of North Carolina, Greensboro Libraries’ “Liaison Roles and Responsibilities” (UNCG Libraries, undated). In response to the question, ‘To what extent did your ALA-accredited master’s program prepare you to…’ respondents were asked to select ‘well’, ‘somewhat’, or ‘did not’ for each item:

Understand the role of library liaison in higher education

Responses to this group of questions both echoed and deviated from other studies’ findings discussed in the literature review. Figure 1 represents survey responses divided into two groups: those from liaison librarians holding only the ALA-accredited master’s (‘ALA Only’), and those holding an additional graduate degree (‘ALA +’). The numbers in parentheses in the chart refer to the number of responses to each item. Respondents could select “not applicable” for those tasks for which they were not responsible.

Figure 1 depicts respondents’ impressions of the quality of preparation they received for specific liaison tasks during the ALA-accredited masters. Indeed, in the case of the item for which the largest percentage of respondents indicated the ALA-accredited master’s prepared them ‘well’ ‘understand[ing] the role of library liaison in higher education’, this option was selected by only 38.2% of those respondents with an additional graduate degree, and only 23.5% of those with the ALA-accredited master’s. This item does illustrate an interesting pattern in survey results, however: those respondents who have completed other graduate work in addition to the ALA- accredited master’s seemed to view that degree in a more favourable light than those who had only completed the ALA-accredited master’s. The percentage of dual-degree holders who categorized themselves as well-prepared by the ALA-accredited master’s to ‘keep current with disciplinary trends in scholarly communication,’ ‘keep current with general trends in scholarly communication’, and ‘understand the role of library liaison in higher education’ are all higher than their single-degreed counterparts. We can only speculate about the reason for this discrepancy: perhaps librarians who have completed graduate work outside the ALA-accredited degree have more realistic expectations for graduate education in general?

We also asked those respondents with an additional graduate degree to assess how well that program prepared them for the same tasks. Figure 2 compares the percentage of respondents who selected ‘well’ to fill in the statement ‘my ALA accredited master’s degree/other graduate degree prepared me…’ for each of the tasks. Note: ‘ALA degree’ category includes both groups of respondents in figure 1. Respondents were invited to select ‘N/A’ if they were not responsible for a specific task among their liaison responsibilities, so the number of responses for individual items vary; these are indicated in the numbers in parentheses.

Note: ‘ALA Degree’ category includes both groups of respondents in figure 1. In Figure 2, responses from the two groups represented in Figure 1 have been collapsed. Figure 2 also includes three items that did not appear in the segment of the survey administered to those respondents who indicated not having completed additional graduate work: ‘examin[ing] papers authored by constituents in specific subject areas for research interests, trends, and use of research sources,’ ‘analys[ing] user data (i.e., reference chat logs, COUNTER usage reports) for trends,’ and ‘monitor[ing] research and publishing trends in specific subject areas.’ Consequently, those items represent a smaller number of respondents.

Comparing respondents’ assessment of the preparation afforded by the ALA-accredited master’s to that provided by other graduate education is eye-opening as well. Only in the case of the item ‘understand the role of library liaison in higher education’ did a notably larger percentage of respondents indicate their ALA-accredited master’s program prepared them ‘well’ than did their subject graduate work. Respondents considered themselves well prepared by other graduate work in several areas, including ‘understand[ing] the specific research processes of the academic disciplines you work with’, ‘communicat[ing] with researchers (faculty and graduate students) regarding their research support needs’, and ‘examin[ing] papers authored by constituents in specific subject areas for research interests, trends, and use of research sources.’

It is interesting to note, however, that respondents did not consider themselves well-prepared by either graduate program in several areas, primarily those typically considered to be under the purview of functional specialists: ‘analys[ing] user data for trends’ (electronic resources management), ‘inform[ing] constituents about issues related to open access publishing, institutional repositories, etc.’ (scholarly communications), ‘encourag[ing] and support[ing] the writing of data management plans’ (research data management), and ‘inform[ing] constituents about scholarly communication issues: copyright, author rights, etc.’ (scholarly communications/copyright). The item ‘support[ing] donor connections as relevant to liaison subject areas’ could be seen as the responsibility of those library staff tasked with fundraising or soliciting materials donations for special collections. Liaisons’ subject knowledge and familiarity with their counterparts in academic departments, however, could make them strong contributors to these efforts.

Responses to our survey suggest LIS programs could improve guidance for students’ interest in becoming academic library liaisons. Increasing curricular offerings where gaps between additional graduate degree holders and those who have only earned the ALA-accredited master’s (e.g., research awareness and understanding) could be particularly beneficial. It appears that LIS education and graduate education in other disciplines have been equally remiss in educating students in functional specializations that could be ‘new liaison’ areas such as data management and scholarly communications. Here, LIS education has an opportunity to stake a position ourselves to our institutional colleagues as expert educators and consultants. Responses to this area of inquiry provide fascinating breadcrumbs for both LIS educators seeking to improve their programs’ preparation for librarians entering academic librarianship and for librarians and library administrators interested in identifying professional development opportunities.