Staffing and Diversity
The quality of the library staff is a barometer of the quality of that library. Even the largest library collections are pretty useless without a knowledgeable, dedicated, service-oriented staff to select, organize and service them. During the past five years, I have had the opportunity to replace over half of the P&S staff, largely due to retirements. This has created an unexpected opportunity to reallocate positions to our highest priority needs and to avoid personnel layoffs during the budget cuts of the last four years. Because so many of our librarian staff had worked here for so long, the opportunity to hire some new librarians has given us an ideal mix of talented, seasoned professionals and newer professionals who have come with fresh perspectives and more recently acquired technical skills. Although we have had to spend considerable time conducting national searches for these vacancies, our efforts have paid off. I believe we have been fortunate to attract and hire excellent additions to our staff.
I was also pleased to be able to make major strides this year in raising the entry level salary of librarians to be more competitive on the national and local job market.
The presence of staff representing a variety of races, ethnicities, and other differences has always been important for Libraries who serve everyone on campus. It is essential that our collections and other resources reflect a diversity of backgrounds, interests, and perspectives. But it is equally important that library users from all backgrounds feel welcome in the libraries and comfortable with our staff. It has been very challenging to attract candidates from racial and ethnic groups for P&S positions. At the present time, 11% of the Libraries P&S staff is from underrepresented groups. We have used all the known recruitment sources that cater to librarians in underrepresented groups for our searches. On a number of occasions, I have personally contacted impressive minority librarians that I have met on a national level to try to entice them to apply for our positions or to help us identify other qualified individuals. On several occasions, I have been disappointed by our inability to hire those few minority candidates who have been part of our recruitment pools. We recruit our Merit staff locally. At the present time, 5% of the Merit staff in the Libraries are minorities.
We did reinstate a second minority resident position this past spring. This position was initially given up during a budget cut (it was one of the few vacancies we had available at the time) but I had always intended to re-establish the position as soon as feasible and we were able to do so through a reallocation of another position. We have just filled that position. Residency positions are 2 year appointments, designed to give entry level librarians from underrepresented groups a range of professional experiences needed in a large academic, research-oriented library.
I also approved the creation of a diversity committee in the Libraries:
This committee has been especially active this year creating a recruitment video, planning a variety of excellent staff development programs, and working on a number of other worthwhile initiatives.
A list of additional diversity efforts can be found in Appendix F.