Academic/ Research Librarians with Subject Doctorates
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WESSWeb > WESS Newsletter > Spring 2009 > Academic/ Research Librarians with Subject Doctorates
Over lunch with a mutual friend at ALA Annual in 2005, we discovered we were both interested in learning more about the career paths and experiences of scholars with subject doctorates becoming academic/research librarians. Our interest stemmed in part from our different paths into librarianship as doctorate holders and in part from how little information on the topic seemed to be available. By the time we got the check and our friend was long gone, we agreed that some kind of formal study of doctorate-holding academic/research librarians would make a valuable contribution to the library literature and decided to collaborate on an article that would be based on a survey of non-LIS doctorate-holding librarians. The following summer we began by generating a list of about 100 questions we felt would help describe the experiences and perceptions of these librarians as a group. We showed the questions to several colleagues, including non-doctorate-holding librarians and doctorate-holding non-librarians, seeking their opinions on the survey instrument. Based on their responses as well as practical considerations about how much data would be manageable for us to sort and interpret, we cut the list of questions down to 30 that we expected would elicit information of greatest interest to an audience of academic/research librarians as well as subject-doctorate holders perhaps considering a career in librarianship.
The first set of questions concerned respondents’ educational background: the field of the respondents’ doctorate, whether respondents hold an MLS, at what point they decided on a career in librarianship, reasons for pursuing the subject doctorate, and reasons for choosing librarianship as a career. Subsequent questions asked about respondents’ current library position: job title, main area of work, type of responsibility, type of library in which they work, whether job duties relate to the subject doctorate (and if so, which), how adequately they feel they are compensated in pay and benefits, and job status (academic/professional, tenure-track, or non-tenure-track). Next came publication record, and then questions about work environment: attitudes they believe library co-workers and teaching faculty hold toward them. Then came a set of general questions: how much repondents like being a librarian, whether they think the profession welcomes those with subject doctorates, and what they see as the greatest advantages and challenges of being a librarian with a subject doctorate. The survey concluded with demographic questions such as age, sex, race/ethnicity, year of birth, year doctorate was earned, and years in the library profession. After the survey fulfilled requirements for conducting human-subject research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, we mounted it on the Web using SurveyMonkey. Some questions were multiple-choice; others were open-ended, allowing respondents to respond in their own words.
In September 2006 we sent an invitation to complete the survey to a number of library-related electronic mailing lists in the US and Canada (many identified via ALA’s website). Over the two-week period that the survey was open, 664 subject doctorate-holding academic/research librarians completed it. We were surprised at the number of respondents the survey attracted, never having imagined there were so many out there. In addition to using the basic data analysis automatically generated in SurveyMonkey, we worked with the Yale University StatLab to generate various frequency tables and cross-tabulations in SPSS, with the goal of identifying and evaluating more complex relationships among variables. Based on the wealth of information we had now amassed, we decided we should write two separate articles: one focusing on quantitative data, the other on qualitative data gathered. The first article, based on the quantitative data, was published in January 2008 in the journal portal: Libraries and the Academy. We began the second article, based on the qualitative data, in the spring of 2008. Because we were now working with open-ended answers in respondents’ own words (as opposed to multiple-choice answers), and because we needed to group and interpret these responses, the second article is taking longer to draft. The extra work has been worth the effort, though, because we have now captured respondents’ statements about their perceptions and experiences with a good deal of detail and subtlety. The second article will, we expect, be published in 2009.
Tod Gilman (todd.gilman@yale.edu)
Thea Lindquist (thea.lindquist AT colorado.edu)
WESSWeb > WESS Newsletter > Spring 2009 > Academic/ Research Librarians with Subject Doctorates
