Issues re: what constitutes an academic librarian?

The core question facing some academic libraries today is the question “What constitutes an academic librarian?” The following are some issues that make answering this question difficult. Please, feel free to add to this list!

1. Your library may have different “types” of librarians. I make no claim for being inclusive in this typology and do not even claim these as discrete categories. The main differences between these types seem to be: when the librarians originally graduated; comfort with technology; whether hired under faculty status and required to go through the tenure process, or grandfathered into tenure and faculty status; the presence or absence of implemented evaluative procedures/standards, and; individual flexibility. It would be great to do a research study on this to see if categories could be developed but the difficulties would be tremendous.

- Librarians who work as traditional librarians and do not publish. They may or may not perpetuate a traditional infrastructure.
- Librarians who are not as wedded to a traditional library infrastructure and traditional job descriptions. They do not publish.
- Librarians hired more recently who are more flexible in their job descriptions, may publish and may be more technologically oriented. This may be the time when Faculty status became an issue and was successfully, or not, achieved.
- Perhaps your most recent hires, the librarians may be the most flexible regarding what they are expected to do, are more technologically oriented and more willing to experiment with library infrastructure. They are expected to publish also.

2. Complicating this scenario is the presence or absence of evaluation procedures and/or standards regarding conditions of employment. The librarians were likely to have been hired under different conditions of employment. It is assumed that with each new collective agreement (assuming one exists) their conditions of employment changed, and unless these new conditions were challenged, or the librarian(s) left employment at that library, they were expected to adhere to them. But unless evaluation procedures were in place and/or enforcement of standards occurred, there will be no consistency in what kind of librarian one is dealing with. You will get a typology similar to the one above.

3. So what happens if your Librarians get Faculty status? You are now dealing with a model for evaluation that may or may not have been customized to fit librarians. So you are now trying to make librarians into faculty using a model initially developed for faculty that, depending on circumstances, may not have been customized very well for library use. Further, when was the last time it was updated? Also, your librarians may not have been trained to do research and how much research?

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