Faculty opinion of subject librarians survey

Abstract

This paper reports on a survey of faculty members performed at Brigham Young University. The survey was a follow-up to a qualitative study of faculty members' perceptions of subject librarians (Wilson et al., 2025), and the survey questions were developed based on questions in the literature and findings of the qualitative study. Surveyed faculty members knew who their subject librarian was and appreciated them. They thought of the main duties of subject librarians as helping students and maintaining collections. Despite appreciating what subject librarians did, faculty did not contact them frequently. Faculty members considered library knowledge as the most important subject librarian skill, followed by communication and people skills. Formal requirements such as degree or status were not important to faculty. For subject librarians to be successful, they should focus on the needs and language of faculty members and strive to communicate with them when they need it and in a way that they will understand. The survey results supported and corroborated the results from the qualitative study, providing an additional method for verifying qualitative results.