Hiring LibrariansI know I am not alone in finding LIS salaries a source of frustration and disappointment. I am really pleased to present this work by Molly Keener, Melissa Levine, and Sarah Wipperman because it is such a practical, thorough approach to the problem. And not only do they have a wonderful article, but they also created a project website which includes their data (upon seeing it, I immediately asked if I could include it here on the Hiring Librarians Salary Transparency resource page). I think you will enjoy the personal account here. If you’d like to read more, the full article is:
Keener, M., Levine, M., & Wipperman, S. (2023). Negotiating for Your Future: Using Salary Data to Advocate for Fairer Compensation. In D. M. Mueller (Ed.), Forging the Future: The Proceedings of the ACRL 2023 Conference, March 15–18, 2023, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Association of College & Research Libraries. https://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2023/NegotiatingforFuture1.pdf
What We Did
Finding salary information is often an exercise in frustration, if not futility, particularly for academic librarians working in specialized or emergent areas. While aggregated salary data is available from government agencies, it isn’t granular enough; sometimes it doesn’t even distinguish between public, academic, school media, and special librarians. Public higher education institutions make their salary data publicly available, but it’s a chore to search institution by institution to collect data; plus, this leaves out private institutions. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) issues annual salary reports, which distinguish between different areas/jobs within academic libraries, although ARL libraries account for a small percentage of all academic libraries and you have to pay to read the report, making it a less-than-ideal source for many. Other salary surveys have been conducted other the years, but inconsistently and not with an eye to our specific area of work, which is copyright and information policy librarianship. So, we set out to conduct our own survey.
In spring 2022, we distributed a survey to members of the University Information Policy Officers (UIPO) organization, the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) scholarly communications listserv, and to alumni of the library-specific Harvard Copyright X course sections to collect data on salaries, professional experience, and other compensation benefits. We aggregated and anonymized the data, presenting preliminary results at the UIPO 2022 Annual Meeting and full results at the 2023 Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference. We also published a paper as part of the conference proceedings.
Our data, survey questions, ACRL presentation slides, and paper are publicly shared in the hope that others can use this data to better negotiate salaries and additional compensation benefits when requesting a raise or taking a new job. We also hope that other library organizations and groups, particularly those representing smaller areas of librarianship, can use our survey questions as a template to conduct their own salary study.
Why We Did It
That’s what we did. But why did we do it? We each have our own reasons, shared below, but our collective reason is that reliable data is essential for successful salary negotiations. Such negotiations are already stressful for both the employee and employer; that stress is compounded when parties are negotiating by guesswork and assumptions because there is no data. So, we set out to collect and share salary and additional compensation benefits data with our fellow copyright and information policy professionals.
Molly Keener
I first proposed this research project at the 2021 UIPO Annual Meeting after realizing that I was suffering from salary compression at my institution. I work at a private university, so I’ve never known what I make relative to my colleagues. When I was promoted to my current position in 2017, I informally collected salary data from peers at public institutions (which is kind of weird and hard to do) to aid me as I negotiated salary and other benefits with my Dean and Associate Dean. I didn’t get everything I wanted, but I did feel good about what I got. When a peer-level job posting went up four years later, I realized that, in that span, my salary had become compressed. This compression was due to my Dean’s diligent work to increase base salaries for all employees at my library (yeah!), so when I told him I was worried I was now compressed, he agreed to take a look and see what he could do. He asked if I knew of any data that might aid him, but I didn’t. That’s when the idea of doing my own salary survey was born. Happily, the salary data we collected was used by my Dean and our budget officer to address my salary compression and bring me up to par.
Melissa Levine
I was interested in learning about salary ranges as aligned with various levels of expectations for these roles. I serve both as a subject matter expert and as an administrator. I need to be able to propose and advocate for salary ranges when we post for new hires. My sense is that overall the salaries are low across the field given the level of expertise and judgment required for many of these positions. I hoped the survey would provide some comparable data across these roles to justify more competitive salaries. I share Molly’s overarching concern regarding salary compression generally. I am particularly concerned in the area of copyright specialists (regardless of the title – copyright librarian, information policy librarian – there are a variety of different titles for similar kinds of roles). It is difficult to distinguish between different levels of expectation in these roles or the expertise needed to be successful. It was challenging to organize this survey because we have a relatively small community (probably under 150 people) and, in theory, one could reverse engineer the data collected to figure out individual salaries – even in an otherwise anonymous survey. I suspect that our results reflect real underreporting particularly that causes the data to skew lower than is accurate. In our initial discussions, we thought through trying to gather data on things like the number of people employed in which state or correlations for public versus private employers. Some of that became unworkable given our privacy concerns, so there were quite a few questions that we simply didn’t ask. That said, one of the valuable outcomes of this work is that it does start to give a picture of what is happening for further discussion.
Sarah Wipperman
When I started working in libraries, I was in a specialized area (scholarly communication/copyright) that typically requires an advanced degree, which I didn’t have. I knew my salary was low, and I was told it was because I didn’t have a Master’s degree. Over the years, as I completed more professional development activities, grew my knowledge and experience, and took on more responsibilities in higher roles, my salary still failed to meet the ranges I saw in similar job postings, what I knew of my peers’ salaries, or what people who reported to me made. Even after I received my Master’s degree, I was not awarded a bump in salary as I had expected, and I lacked the evidence I needed to back up my requests. Like Molly, I had a very difficult time finding comparable salary data that I could use to advocate for myself, and even when I could find salary ranges, they were often an incredibly wide range with very little information on how that correlated to years of experience, degrees/certifications, management roles, etc. – they were basically useless. Salary data in libraries can be particularly difficult to gauge for more specialized/newer roles that may be quite different from one institution to the next, and I never really had a grasp on what might be fair compensation for the work I was doing. I was incredibly eager when Molly proposed this research to help in some way. Although the data was no longer very useful for my own purposes as I had taken on a position at a new institution and eventually decided to leave libraries, I hoped that the data might help someone avoid the pitfalls that I experienced and to bring more transparency to this field.
What’s Next
We don’t have any current plans to continue this survey, although we are hopeful that the UIPO organization might pick it up as a program. We do hope that people are able to use the salary survey data to aid their own negotiations, or even just get a pulse read on salaries in our niche corner of librarianship. And if others out there can take our survey questions and collect their own data, that would be super!
Molly Keener is the Director of Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communication at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. She is an expert in copyright in libraries and supports faculty, staff, and students in matters relating to copyright, author rights, fair use, open access, and scholarly publishing. As the head of the Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communication department, she works with her colleagues to ensure that the library is advancing services and innovative opportunities for faculty and students to expand their concept of scholarship. She’s been at Wake Forest University for over 17 years. Molly earned her MLIS at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her BA in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Melissa Levine is the director of the University of Michigan Library’s Copyright Office, providing guidance on copyright policy and practice in the university context. On any given day, questions range from open access and open data to copyright in scholarly publishing and artificial intelligence. She is a member of the library’s Research Directors group and serves on the steering committee for the University of Michigan’s Museum Studies Program. She has worked at several university museums and at the Smithsonian Institution, where she handled business affairs including publishing and licensing matters. She served as Assistant General Counsel and Legal Advisor for the Library of Congress’s National Digital Library Project. She teaches a course on intellectual property and information law for the University of Michigan School of Information with experience teaching asynchronously online (Melissa taught a fully online course on museums, law, and policy for the masters in museum studies program at Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Advanced Academic Programs). She is on the board of OCEAN, the Open Copyright Education Advisory Network, a new tax-exempt organization dedicated to open copyright education for people working in museums, libraries, archives, and cultural heritage broadly. Melissa received her undergraduate degree in history and art history from Emory University and her law degree from the University of Miami School of Law.
Sarah Wipperman is a Scholarly Communications Specialist for the non-profit project OA.Works, where she wrangles data and helps to build tools to make Open Access easier for funders and universities. Prior to OA.Works, Sarah worked in university libraries for nearly a decade, first as an institutional repository manager and then as a Scholarly Communications Librarian specializing in issues related to publishing, copyright, author rights, Open Access, and scholarly infrastructure. Sarah earned her Masters in Law from Penn Law and her BA in Anthropology from New York University.
https://hiringlibrarians.com/2024/02/27/researchers-corner-negotiating-for-your-future/
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