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This paper explores trends over time in library staffing and staffing expenditures among two- and four-year colleges and universities in the United States.

Researchers merged and analyzed data from 1996 to 2016 from the National Center for Education Statistics for over 3,500 libraries at postsecondary institutions. This study is primarily descriptive in nature and addresses the research questions: How do staffing trends in academic libraries over this period of time relate to Carnegie classification and institution size? How do trends in library staffing expenditures over this period of time correspond to these same variables?

Across all institutions, on average, total library staff decreased from 1998 to 2012. Numbers of librarians declined at master’s and doctoral institutions between 1998 and 2016. Numbers of students per librarian increased over time in each Carnegie and size category. Average inflation-adjusted staffing expenditures have remained steady for master's, baccalaureate and associate's institutions. Salaries as a percent of library budget decreased only among doctoral institutions and institutions with 20,000 or more students.

This is a valuable study of trends over time, which has been difficult without downloading and merging separate data sets from multiple government sources. As a result, few studies have taken such an approach to this data. Consequently, institutions and libraries are making decisions about resource allocation based on only a fraction of the available data. Academic libraries can use this study and the resulting data set to benchmark key staffing characteristics.

The purpose of this paper is to provide readers with a deeper theoretical understanding of liminality, its utility in understanding the experiences of graduate student researchers and how being explicit about the liminal nature of the graduate student experience can be especially impactful for students from marginalized communities.

This conceptual paper examines liminality as an essential component of researcher identity development and how an awareness of this liminality relates to effective and inclusive librarian support of graduate student researchers. The authors explore the affective and academic implications of operating in this liminal state and how direct acknowledgment of this inbetweenness, especially within the spaces of classroom instruction and research consultations, can be leveraged as an inclusive practice. The authors ground this exploration in critical pedagogy.

Graduate student researchers often operate in an unacknowledged liminal state, which causes students to question the importance of their previous knowledge and life experiences and feel discouraged and uncertain about their potential place in academia. This is particularly damaging to students from communities that have been traditionally marginalized and excluded from higher education.

The authors are liaison librarians to education and health sciences at a large, minority-serving, urban research institution in the western USA and draw on their experience supporting students in disciplines that include many students returning to graduate studies after substantial professional experience. This work makes a contribution to library and information studies by focusing on the concept of liminality. The authors offer a conceptual perspective on liminality relative to librarians and their support role in the graduate student experience.

This article seeks to address differential experiences of the “time squeeze”. It problematises current accounts which explain time pressure as resulting from substantive increases in the volume of activities performed in daily life and/or an acceleration of the tempo of daily practices.

The main data source is in‐depth household interviews, although analysis of data from the 1985 and 1992 Health and Lifestyle Survey and the 1937 “day in the life of diaries” are also examined.

It is argued that harriedness best captures contemporary temporal experiences. Three forms of harriedness are identified: substantive overload; temporal dis‐organisation; and, temporal density. The latter two forms are characterised by the challenge of coordinating practices within social networks and the difficulty of allocating practices in relation to temporally fixed institutional events.

It is suggested that these two forms of harriedness capture women's experiences more so than men's, and that technologies which facilitate time saving and shifting exacerbate rather than alleviate this temporal conditioning of daily life.