University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"Answering the Calls of ""What's Next"" and ""Library Workers Cannot Live by Love Alone"" through Certification and Salary Research"

Grady, Jenifer

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/15367

Description

Title
"Answering the Calls of ""What's Next"" and ""Library Workers Cannot Live by Love Alone"" through Certification and Salary Research"
Author(s)
Grady, Jenifer
Issue Date
2009
Keyword(s)
  • Certified Public Library Administrator Program
  • Library Support Staff Certification Program
  • Library administrators -- Certification -- United States
  • Library administrators -- Salaries, etc. -- United States
  • Career development -- United States
  • Library and information science
  • Labor studies
Abstract
Members and staff of the American Library Association (ALA) worked diligently over more than a decade to develop a certification program for public library managers. Spurred by a long-standing trend in many other terminal-degree professions that have post-degree, voluntary certifications, the Certified Public Library Administrator Program was born. Legal authority recommended the establishment of a service organization, a 501(c)(6) to manage the program, which has become one of several programs that will be offered to library employees under the imprimatur of ALA. After the American Library Association–Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) was instituted, advocacy for salary improvement initiatives was appended to the mission. One means of salary advocacy was to improve available data by expanding the scope and usefulness of the ALA Survey of Librarian Salaries, which resulted in the ALA-APA Salary Survey: Non-MLS—Public and Academic, conducted in 2006 and 2007 to collect salary data from more than sixty positions in the field that do not require a master's degree in Library Science. The experience of establishing two certification programs, the Certified Public Library Administrator Program (CPLA®) and the Library Support Staff Certification Program, has been a study in creating new national models of professional development. This article will also discuss the insights that have emerged from fulfilling elements of ALA strategic plans concerning the needs of support staff through certification and the salary survey.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/15367
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections

Library Trends 58 (2) Fall 2009: Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science PRIMARY
Library Trends 58 (2) Fall 2009: Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science. Edited by Joanne Gard Marshall, Paul Solomon and Susan Rathbun-Grubb.