ACRL WORKS WITH CUPA-HR (College and University Professional Association for Human Resources) to UPDATE ACADEMIC LIBRARY POSITION DESCRIPTIONS

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

As a national authority of compensation surveys for higher education Human Resource professionals, CUPA-HR conducts annual salary surveys. They publish annual salary surveys, plus benefits and benchmarking surveys. To the interest of academic libraries, CUPA-HR has for many years collected and compiled survey results for Library Administrators, and Mid-Level Administrators and Professionals.  These data results from the surveys are regularly used by higher education institutions to establish and calibrate salaries for many positions and in this case for library professionals.  In 2005, it became obvious to one ACRL member institution that the CUPA-HR data used as one factor in a predictive regression analysis for professional salaries was well out of date.  When investigated, the institution determined that the CUPA-HR library position description categories, that academic libraries had been entering, no doubt “wedging information into” bore only limited resemblance to current library positions and responsibilities. That was the beginning of the this project which has with the excellent cooperation of CUPA-HR and ACRL leadership, will lead to this fall’s CUPA-HR survey publication of 19 new and comprehensive academic library position descriptions.  That is just the start however, as several years of survey results need to be collected and reported in these new categories in order for the rest of higher education to have usable benchmarks.  

ACRL Task Force Charge
Process of Collecting Input
Original Task Force Spreadsheet
Findings and their meaning
Recommended use of the position descriptions
The New Position Descriptions
Members of the ACRLTask Force
2009 Administrative Compensation Survey Results
2009 Mid-Level Salary Survey Results
2011 Administrative Compensation Survey Results
2011 Mid-Level Salary Survey Results