THE STATUS OF FACULTY STATUS FOR ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS - A 20-YEAR PERSPECTIVE

In 1990, data on the employment status of librarians was collected from two groups of academic libraries in higher education-a random sample of all institutions in the United States and all academic members of the Association of Research Libraries. This data provides a twenty-year retrospective of librarians' status and indicates that 67 percent of higher education institutions grant them faculty status. In general, faculty status for librarians has been vigorously expanded during the same period, though the process has slowed in recent years. Understandably, librarians with faculty status evince perquisites similar, but not identical to, teaching faculty. In addition, 7.3 percent of the institutions sampled grant librarians academic status, which carries many characteristics of faculty status. Thus in over 74 percent of the sampled institutions, librarians have a status that conforms closely to the ACRL standard. Among the ARL members, the general condition has changed little since the last major survey in 1982.