Subject expertise

Librarians and information specialists may be primary educated in a specific discipline such a chemistry, medicine or music, or they may be primarily educated in Library and Information Science (LIS). The relative distribution of subject specialism and generalism varies from place to place and is influenced by many different causes, including availability of people with different kinds of education. Also professional influences and power-relations may be important: In some countries, specific educations have a monopoly on library positions in public libraries. (This is, for example, the case in Denmark but not in Sweden).

 

The general tendency is that small public libraries have only generalists, while big academic libraries have both many generalists and many subject specialists. Databases such as MEDLINE often require advanced subject degrees (in case in biomedicine) for the indexers.

 

The situation in LIS corresponds to the situation in other fields such as teaching. Some teachers are primarily educated as teachers with educational and psychological studies as the core curriculum, while other teachers primarily are educated in the subject they teach. In general: the lower, the level, the more general is the education. In higher education is a PhD today a standard requirement in the subject you teach.

 

Such issues are not just professional concerns, but also deeply theoretical issues. In translating a French legal text into English, how much linguistic knowledge is needed and how much legal knowledge? To what degree are algorithms for translation or for information retrieval domain specific?

 

Generalism versus subject specialism need not, however, be an either-or, but can be combined.  In schools of LIS may subject specific issues be taught, e.g. knowledge organization and information retrieval in the humanities. A theoretical frame of reference for LIS that recognize the necessity of subject knowledge is the domain analytic approach (cf., Hjørland, 2002).

 

Zhang, Anghelescu & Yuan (2005). found that the level of domain knowledge seems to have an effect on search behaviour, but not on search effectiveness, and that search behaviour does not seem to be related to search effectiveness.

 

Lind & Sandmann (2003) found that a person shows expert-like and also novice-like strategy use depending on the  domain he or she is learning in. They found a significant correlation between the strategy used during the learning sessions and the learning outcomes. Many subjects systematically over-estimate their use of learning strategies.

 

Sihvonen & Vakkari (2004) found that a vital condition for benefiting from a thesaurus in query expansion to improve search results is sufficient familiarity with the search topic. The results suggest also that it is not in the first place the number of terms used in expansion, but their type and quality  that are crucial for search success.

 

 

"In order to achieve good consistent indexing, the indexer must have a thorough appreciation of the structure of the subject  and the nature of the contribution that the document is making to the advancement of knowledge." (Rowley & Farrow, 2000, p. 99).

 

 

Literature:

 

Alexander, P. A. & Judy, J. E. (1988). The interaction of domain-knowledge and strategic knowledge in academic performance. Review of Educational Research, 58(4), 375-404.

 

Aubrey, C. (Ed.). (1994). The Role of Subject Knowledge in the Early Years of Schooling. London. Falmer Press.

 

Bade, D. W. (2002). The Creation and Persistence of Misinformation in Shared Library Catalogs: Language and Subject Knowledge in a Technological Era. Champaign-Urbana, Ill.: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Univ. of Illinois (Occasional Papers, no. 211).

 

Goodson, I. F., Anstead, C. J. & Mangan, J. M. (1998). Subject Knowledge: Readings for the Study of School Subjects. London, UK: Falmer Press. (Falmer Press Teacher's Library Series).

 

Hjørland, B. (2002). Domain analysis in information science. Eleven approaches - traditional as well as innovative. Journal of Documentation, 58(4), 422-462. http://web.archive.org/web/20040721022850/http://www.db.dk/bh/publikationer/Filer/JDOC_2002_Eleven_approaches.pdf

 

Krarup, K. & Boserup, I. (1982). Reader-Oriented Indexing. An investigation into the extent to which suject specialists should be used for the indexing of documents by and for professional readers, based on a sample of sociological documents indexed with the help of the PRECIS indexing system.  Copenhagen: The Royal Library. 

 

Lind, G. & Sandmann, A. (2003). Lernstrategien und Domänenwissen [Learning strategies and domain knowledge]. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 211(4), 171-192.

 

O'Donnell, E.; Kock, B. & Boone, J. (2005). The influence of domain knowledge and task complexity on tax professionals' compliance recommendations. Accounting Organizations and Society, 30(2), 145-165.

 

Ranganathan, C. & Sethi, V. (2002). Rationality in strategic information technology decisions: The  impact of shared domain knowledge and IT unit structure. Decision Sciences, 33(1), 59-86.

 

Rindflesch, T. C. & Fiszman, M. (2003). The interaction of domain knowledge and linguistic structure in natural language processing: interpreting hypernymic propositions in biomedical text. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 36(6), 462-477.

 

Rowley, J. E. & Farrow, J. (2000). Organizing Knowledge: An Introduction to Managing Access to Information. 3rd. Alderstot: Gower Publishing Company.
 

Siau, K. (2005). Human-computer interaction: The effect of application domain knowledge on icon visualization. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 45(3), 53-62.

 

Sihvonen, A. & Vakkari, P. (2004). Subject knowledge improves interactive query expansion assisted by a thesaurus. Journal of Documentation, 60(6), 673-690.

 

Wilcox, A. B. & Hripcsak, G. (2003). The role of domain knowledge in automating medical text report classification. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 10(4), 330-338.

 

Wildemuth, B. M. (2004). The effects of domain knowledge on search tactic formulation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(3), 246-258.

 

Zhang, X. M.; Anghelescu, H. G. B. & Yuan, X. J. (2005). Domain knowledge, search behaviour, and search effectiveness of engineering and science students: an exploratory study. Information Research- An International Electronic Journal, 10(2), 217. Available at:  http://informationr.net/ir/10-2/paper217.html

 

 

 

See also: Domain knowledge; Knowledge, forms of; Subject specialists

 

 

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 29-05-2007

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