Publish or Perish: A Dilemma for Academic Librarians?

This study examines the influence of scholarly requirements on librarians’ ability to earn tenure or continuous employment. After a literature review, the authors present the results of a survey of research, doctoral, and master’s-level institutions. Of the 690 responding institutions, 54.3 percent employ tenure-track librarians. Of these, more than 60 percent require some scholarship and 34.6 percent encourage it. At these 374 institutions, 92.2 percent of librarians who underwent tenure review during a three-year period were approved. The authors summarize survey information on librarians not granted tenure as well as those believed by directors to have resigned to avoid tenure review

ACRL: the learning community for excellence in academic libraries: the presidential theme for the coming year

My purpose in writing this column is to share why I chose the presidential theme of "ACRL: The Learning Community for Excellence in Academic Libraries" and to explain why I think the learning community concept is such a powerful one. I also hope to set the stage for the coming year's columns, which will share this common theme

September 11th and Academic Libraries

I am writing this editorial only a month after the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Although I had no desire to write on such a horrifying topic, I could not forego this opportunity to share my pride in our library profession and in our role in American democracy, as so ably articulated by ALA Past President Nancy Kranich with her theme "Libraries: the Cornerstone of American Democracy.

Publish or Perish: A Dilemma for Academic Librarians?

A study investigated the influence of scholarly requirements on the ability of librarians to earn tenure or continuous employment. A total of 690 academic libraries at research, doctoral, and master's-level institutions participated. It was found that 374 of these institutions employed tenure-track librarians. In the case of 373 institutions where librarians were tenure-track, 60.9 percent required some evidence of scholarship, 34.6 percent encouraged scholarship, and 4.6 percent placed little or no emphasis on scholarship. Results suggest that even though most librarians tend not to publish regularly, librarians as a group do not have significant difficulty achieving tenure. Discussion of the results is provided

Bibliographic Instruction And The Reference Desk

No Abstrac

Tenured Librarians In Large University Libraries

The article is based on a 1979 survey of 530 tenured librarians in thirty-three large academic libraries. The professional productivity of the librarians pre- and post-tenure is examined as well as the tenure criteria and evaluation process applied at the time the surveyed librarians received tenure. Comparisons to the situation in 1979 are drawn. The mobility pattern of tenured librarians is also explored

Intellectual Freedom and Library Instruction: the centrality of the connection. (includes Appalachian State University policy statement).

Effective library instruction is a necessary component of information literacy and intellectual freedom. Instructors should incorporate censorship issues and illustrate the complexities of combating censorship in library instruction presentations

English and Reichel Share Plans for ACRL

C&RL News offered ACRL candidates for vice-president/president-elect, Ray English and Mary Reichel, this opportunity to share their views with the membership. Although many of the issues facing ACRL are discussed informally at meetings, we want to use this venue to provide a national forum to all members. We hope this will assist you in making an informed choice when you receive your ballot this spring

Reports from the Congress on Professional Education

More than 100 delegates from national and international associations of library and information studies, educators, and professionals convened in Washington, D.C. for a two-day Congress on Professional Education, April 30-May 1, 1999, sponsored by ALA. The Congress aimed to reach consensus among stakeholder groups on the values and core competencies of the profession and on strategies for action to address common issues and concerns. The impetus for the Congress arose from changes in name of some programs of graduate education, the seeming lack of attention to core competencies, and the national shortage of professionals to work with young people and diverse and underserved populations. Following are reports from two ACRL members who attended the Congress

Machine Learning of Probabilistic Phonological Pronunciation Rules from the Italian CLIPS Corpus

A blending of phonological concepts and technical analysis is proposed to yield a better modeling and understanding of phonological processes. Based on the manual segmentation and labeling of the Italian CLIPS corpus we automatically derive a probabilistic set of phonological pronunciation rules: a new alignment technique is used to map the phonological form of spontaneous sentences onto the phonetic surface form. A machine-learning algorithm then calculates a set of phonologi- cal replacement rules together with their conditional probabilities. A critical analysis of the resulting probabilistic rule set is presented and discussed with regard to regional Italian accents. The rule set presented here is also applied in the newly published web-service WebMAUS that allows a user to segment and phonetically label Italian speech via a simple web-interface