Liaison (or subject specialist) librarians are routinely identified as essential to the sustained success of academic libraries. Yet despite the purported centrality of liaisons to the mission of their institutions, many libraries have struggled to define the role of the subject specialist. These attempts at definition have resulted in a…

This study utilized dissertation bibliographies produced at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, a STEM-oriented university, to ascertain how well Purdue's Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education Library supports doctoral research. To examine a critical mass of data, the authors gathered all the bibliographies of dissertations written…