Academic Librarian Status

Academic librarians hold a variety professional status in different institutions. However, information about librarian status is not easy to discover.

During the promotion and tenure process librarians are often required to find external librarians of the same status to review their packets. Thus, this lack of information presents a “pesky bottleneck”, as Elizabeth Choinski observes in College & Research Libraries News (2016). Choinski encourages institutions to better represent librarian status in their web directories and for librarians to contribute information to the Academic Librarian Wikispaces (archived).

When Wikispaces was shut down in 2018, the content was migrated to the Academic Librarian Status WordPress site. It does not appear to have been updated since. This website harvested that data and presents it as a sortable, searchable table for better ease of use (plus a few minimal updates to the data).

You may also be interested to see ACRL “Standards for Faculty Status for Academic Librarians” and “Standard for the Appointment, Promotion and Tenure of Academic Librarians”.

Records in this data set:

professional status count
faculty status and tenure 165
faculty or academic status but no tenure 56
mix of professional statuses 20
without faculty status 28
without faculty status but with status similar to tenure 17