Michael McGrorty Has Posted a table that shows starting salaries for librarians at the twenty-five largest public library systems in the United States. He writes: “Surveys of librarian salaries often include libraries that are quite small and therefore unlikely ever to pay reasonable salaries to their employees; this compilation reveals that low starting salaries are also a problem within the country’s richest libraries.
Many library systems have difficulty attracting candidates for entry-level librarian jobs. These salary levels go a long way toward explaining the problem. The vast majority of the systems in this survey are in urban or highly-populated areas where candidates should neither be difficult to find nor reluctant to seek work, yet many of these libraries maintain permanent postings for new help. The pay for the position is simply too low: too small to compete with other work, too small to live on. The New York Public Library offers $35,563 to a new library school graduate; adjusted for the area’s cost of living, the figure comes out to less than half that much.“
It’s like I’ve always said….
this just points up the fundamental problem that I believe exists with libraries and salarie – if you’re not valued you won’t be compensated properly, and WE (librarians and libraries) need to do a better job of demontrating our value and convincing the public and those with the money of our value.
We do too good a job of “making do” with what we have and stretching services, money, people, and not a good enough job of “tooting our own horns.”
Re:It’s like I’ve always said…. … well they can pay staff less and reduce staff and maintain the same level of service.
As budgets shrink so should services- not staff. Making do with fewer staff & paying staff less while providing the same level of service only shows that
Notice how the communities- Salinas and the like- only notice when the library is circling the drain. So if they cut funding; cut hours, cut collection development, do away with story time. Until we librarians learn that we have to hit the communities with a hammer to get them to notice us we will be taken for granted.
As information professionals we want to make our services available, but that is not possible if we are shortchanged. McDonalds didn’t give away fries when the minimum wage went up they raised the prices. Since we can’t raise the price we have to cut services. Until librarians get the gonads to say no we will be asked to continually do more with less.
(This is not limited to libraries, the nursing profession has similar problems but the nurses organizations seem to have more guts than the library organizations. The NLN made patients, hospital administrators, and legislators well aware what overburdening nurses could cause.)