Rethinking Scholarship in Academic Librarianship [Link fixed!]: Eric Schnell on some important issues for academics.
The nature of librarianship and scholarly communication has changed drastically over the past decade while the definition of scholarship for academic librarians is stuck in time. Scholarship in libraries with tenure track librarians is still universally equated with research and publication in traditional peer-reviewed journal articles and monographs. In fact, there are disincentives to exploring alternative forms of scholarship since faculty are reluctant to pursue them since such activities have historically not been valued positively, or not weighed equally, during faculty evaluations.
2 brief critiques
Just 2 brief comments by way of critique:
1) At some universities with tenure-tracks for librarians, the standards for librarians are looser/somewhat less rigorous for them than for regular faculty. At one academic library I interviewed for, the librarians were getting credit for publishing articles of personal interest in places like the Marine Corps gazette, etc; The logic being that since it helps for reference librarians to know a little bit of everything, they should get credit for expanding their own knowledge base in whatever direction they like, as this will ultimately benefit patrons also when this is encouraged.
2) There are plenty of institutions where librarians don’t have faculty status nor tenure requirements….some have quasi-faculty status as “instructors” or “adjuncts”, while others are just purely “staff”. Thus “freed” from the “old-fashioned” requirements of tenure, there should be a blossoming of “new, innovative, non-traditional” research (whatever that means) from librarians in such institutions…which I’m sure LIS News will let us know about.