In the good old days, checking out a library book involved scrawling a name and due date on a card. Today, the library is a technical hub of research and online catalogues. But while library operations have advanced light years, library assistants are still stuck in a pay range of days past.
Employees at the University of California are now expected to produce spread sheets, write HTML and operating a circulation system on-line, and are receiving wages somewhat less than an executive secretary…more from the California Aggie.
BFD
It doesn’t say how much they are making, it seems that it would be an important fact to include in the article. I bet they are making more than me with my MLS.
They have to make spreadsheets and code HTML. I bet they are not hand coding it ( I looked at some of the source code from the UC Davis library website they are not). That sure beats digging ditches or for that matter shelving books.
I know they got me beat on the retirement bit because we only have a 401k match here, we are a quasi-governmental special taxing agency and not an arm of the state or county governments.
So please forgive me if I don’t get too upset over unionized library assistants retirement pay. They could always go to library school for free since they are California State employees.
Signed-
Bitter Back East
apples to apples
Its nice that they were willing to compare to executive assistants (aka secretaries). It has nothing to with the changes in job description, they’ve changed for the exec. assistants too, they simply have better unions and/or more influence with top.
Library Assistants
…or in Canada, Library Technicians.
I can tell you from first hand experience that the LTs in the school board where I am employeed get paid substantially less then our counterparts. We are unionized (some are happy about that, others aren’t) and we have been fighting for government mandated pay equity for almost 10 years. Our top level LT’s (responsible for maintaining the library catalogue and databases, online resources, websites (raw code), inventories and training) salaries top out at $41,600…and that’s after five years experience. The bulk of our LT’s work in the school libraries and make $34,400 after five years experience.
Unfortunately, our experience here has shown that even our colleagues in the library don’t support the work that we do (often it’s the background work that isn’t ‘seen’ by the patrons), so how can we expect to get respect and reconigition from the public?