What on earth is their justification of this? I have never heard of something like that, and I'm part of the 64-campus SUNY system which includes campuses of all types, from community colleges through major research universities. When it comes to tenured librarians, they don't differentiate between pub/tech/other services.
I am a head of Tech Services, was formerly an Acquisitions librarian, and have tenure, as do all of our librarians.
I know that some places hire "non-librarians" for some technical roles such as programmers, but those positions don't require an MLS. In addition, the curriculum at the average library school covers a wide variety of what technical services librarians do...I'm sure those programs would help defend the tenure-worthiness of technical services work.
I hate to get into a debate on back-room vs front-of-house librarians, mostly because I think the distinction is useless. If you catalog...you are creating records to be used by your public. If you buy books, they are to be used by your users-and you must KNOW your users and their needs as well as any public services librarian. To think that a tech services librarian is by default going to be not public-service-oriented is baseless. In addition, most good public services librarians now have to be just as "technical" as the rest, and have to understand the systems in order to use them.
Maybe it's the term "acquisitions" or "technical services" that throws them off. Collection Librarian? Collection Access Librarian? Human-Information Interface Coordinator? Yes, that would definitely be tenure-worthy ;)
-Karen Gelles
Greenley Library
Farmingdale State College, SUNY
From: acqnet-l-bounces_at_lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:acqnet-l-bounces_at_lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of acqnet-l_at_lists.ibiblio.org
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2013 10:32 AM
To: Acqnet
Subject: [ACQNET-L] Tenured Acquisitions librarians?
All
I would like to know how many Acquisitions Librarians on the list are tenured. The library administration at my institution has declared that tenured librarians should not be working in tech services, but only public services. I'm trying to gather information on whether there are institutions that differentiate among librarian status and where they work in the library.
As background, at American, we have 2 statuses - tenured or tenure-track and Term librarians. The term librarians are on multi-year contracts and their creative and scholarly duties are less than the tenured librarians. There are 3 library faculty in tech services - 1 is tenured and 2 are term. We are currently hiring for the Director of Technical Services and that would be a term position.
thanks for any information you are willing to provide.
Stacey
Stacey Marien
Acquisitions Librarian
American University Library
smarien_at_american.edu<mailto:smarien_at_american.edu>
202-885-3842
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Received on Wed Jul 17 2013 - 18:43:20 EDT