Search results

Although a great deal has been written about the challenges and opportunities for collaboration between librarians and professors in higher education, most recommendations for faculty–library collaboration are written by librarians, published in librarian-oriented venues, and rely on second-hand accounts of professorial perceptions and experiences. Dialogue between librarians and professors is missing. In this chapter, the authors present a duoethnographic inquiry into a librarian–professor collaboration: the authors collaboratively examine their four years working together on the senior seminar course “Small Business Management” at Acadia University, Canada. In considering the evolution of their course and their collaboration, the authors reflect on six dimensions of their experiences: the way their collaboration has shaped the course learning outcomes, the value the authors have derived from collaboratively reflexive teaching, the workload tensions the authors have navigated, the challenge of “fitting in,” and the role of library champion. The authors then conclude with four insights from their professorial–librarian collaboration that might be transferable to other contexts of higher education: the importance of openness, collegiality, time for collaboration, and attention to the cultural gaps between professorship and librarianship.

This article examines the discourse of appointment, promotion, and tenure (APT) documents for academic librarians. Discourse analysis can illuminate the social role of language, social systems, and social practices.

This qualitative research analyzes the APT documents for librarians from a group of US universities (n = 50) whose librarians are tenured faculty (n = 35). Linguistic features were examined to identify genre (text type) and register (language variety) characteristics.

The documents showed strong relationships with other texts; vocabulary from the language of human resources (HR); grammatical characteristics such as nominalization; passive constructions; few pronouns; the “quasi-synonymy” of series of adjectives, nouns, or verbs; and expression of certainty and obligation. The documents have a sociolinguistic and social semiotic component. In using a faculty genre, librarians assert solidarity with other faculty, while the prominent discourse of librarians as practitioners detracts from faculty solidarity.

This research is limited to librarians at US land grant institutions. It has implications for other research institutions and other models of librarian status.

This research can help academic librarians fulfill their obligations by understanding how values encoded in these documents reflect positive and negative approaches.

Higher education and academic librarianship are in a state of flux. Understanding the discourse of these documents can help librarians encode appropriate goals and values. Little has been written on the discourse of librarianship. This is a contribution to the understanding of librarians as a discourse community and of significant communicative events.

We are living in an electronic age, where everything that we want to know or are curious about is increasingly facilitated by the internet and search engines. Now, much of the world’s knowledge is at our fingertips. Students have unlimited access to information in the form of e-books, journals and other open sources. The value of a physical repository of knowledge is diminishing and the printing of material is becoming less compelling. It has been noted that college students spend as much time on the internet as they do while studying (Jones, 2002). The most pertinent question is whether the library is still considered an important source of information to students? Can we imagine a university without a library with just computers and a server room? The information highway is posing new challenges that the librarians have to deal with (Dunn, 2002; Rockman & Smith, 2002). In the past, gatekeepers like the librarian decided what a student should read, depending on their level of study and their comprehension power. The picture has altered and now students decide what exactly they should read with the click of their computers. Leaders in higher education institutions are skeptical as to how much they should actually invest in buying books, how many shelves to create to stack them and whether the collection of books is going to be an indicator of the academic quality of that institution. This book talks about a vital subject as to how much and in what ways a library can engage a student to create information literacy. Various interventions have been discussed as case studies in colleges and universities from Canada to India. Student-centered workshops have been designed along with university partnerships with a writing center as well as the role of a library as a source of socio-economic transformation in Africa. The experiences shared by the authors in this book will be a valuable resource for librarians across the world as they increase their collaborative efforts to promote the value of information literacy for students.

The institution of tenure has elicited debate and controversy since its introduction in higher education. Proponents argue the need for tenure based on academic freedom and efficient university governance. Critics argue that it represents inefficiency in the higher education labor market and protects less productive faculty members. The use of tenure in academic libraries has been no less controversial, with only 40−60% of academic libraries supporting tenure track positions for academic librarians. This dichotomy in the labor market for academic librarians represents a natural experiment and allows for the testing of the presence of a compensating wage differential for tenure.

This study examines 10 years’ worth of cross-sectional data drawn from member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Models examine both the institutional characteristics of tenure-granting ARL academic libraries and the impact of tenure on starting salaries. Issues related to both a union wage premium and a compensating wage differential due to tenure are explored. The results of this research suggest that tenure, while serving other functions within an academic library setting, does not have the predicted impact on starting salaries.

For over two decades, we have known from melding fertility and immigration data, that the population of the United States would become steadily more diverse. Throughout the 1990s it was reported that one in four persons in the nation was a minority. By the time we entered the new millennium, that figure increased to one in three. Now it is predicted that in the year 2030, the emerging majority of Americans will be people of color. No matter the type of library or information agency, in this century all will face the challenge of providing service to population within the context of an entirely new order of pluralism.