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Pay, benefits, perquisites, the work environment and the intrinsic rewards that it offers, all need to be used to attract the executive a library needs and wants. To that end, this article provides an overview of current practices in library executive compensation, with an explanation of various approaches and the provision of ideas for compensation components. This is especially pertinent, as nearly 60 percent of professional librarians will retire, including a large number of library executives, during the next ten to 15 years. Other fields and professions face similarly large numbers of retirements. The competition for top‐quality library executives will be fierce. Both library executives and libraries hiring new executives need to be aware of the variety of compensation approaches available to them.

Few issues in recent times have so provoked debate and dissention within the library field as has the concept of fees for user services. The issue has aroused the passions of our profession precisely because its roots and implications extend far beyond the confines of just one service discipline. Its reflection is mirrored in national debates about the proper spheres of the public and private sectors—in matters of information generation and distribution, certainly, but in a host of other social ramifications as well, amounting virtually to a debate about the most basic values which we have long assumed to constitute the very framework of our democratic and humanistic society.