How many librarians are there in the united states

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Menu Search button Search:. Summary Please enable javascript to play this video. What Librarians and Library Media Specialists Do About this section Librarian's job duties vary based on the type of library they work in, such as a public, school, or medical library.

Work Environment About this section Librarians plan outreach programs targeted toward different groups, such as story time for children. Job Outlook About this section Librarians and Library Media Specialists Percent change in employment, projected Librarians and media collections specialists.

Librarians and media collections specialists Projections Central Occupational employment projections are developed for all states by Labor Market Information LMI or individual state Employment Projections offices. CareerOneStop CareerOneStop includes hundreds of occupational profiles with data available by state and metro area.

Similar Occupations About this section This table shows a list of occupations with job duties that are similar to those of librarians and library media specialists. Contacts for More Information About this section For more information about librarians and library media specialists, including accredited library education programs, visit American Library Association For more information about becoming a school librarian or library media specialist, contact your state board of education.

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Bachelor's degree. Archivists, Curators, and Museum Workers. See How to Become One. For these reasons, it does not currently make sense to use ALISE data as the basis for answering questions about the relationship between library schools and the library job market.

The last three CIP code revisions—, , and —have the same code number for Library Science, I have written to each of these schools and included their information in the following table.

My goal for this essay was not to engage in detailed statistical analysis. Rather, I wanted to verify that useful data is available for free from a readily accessible source, a necessary step before progressing to part two of this essay.

However, before discussing part two, it seems useful to make a few observations about the data and ask a few questions that may eventually lead to useful information. All ten classes appear to be primarily attributable to two administrators. And if it is not, are there remedies that would avoid creating even greater issues than the problem they would be intended to address? The rankings are based solely on the results of a fall survey sent to the dean of each program, the program director, and a senior faculty member in each program.

The questionnaires asked individuals to rate the academic quality of programs at each institution as outstanding 5 , strong 4 , good 3 , adequate 2 , or marginal 1. The significant variation in the number of students in accredited library programs, along with the rapid increase in the number of students who receive their library training without ever meeting one of their professors in person, harks back to library education at this point in the last century. There were few training programs we would think of today as library schools, so many of the people hired to work as librarians received their education through correspondence-based programs.

In , the Carnegie Corporation hired Charles C. Williamson to assess library education and make recommendations for how it might best support libraries and their users.

Working together, ALA and the Carnegie Corporation were increasing demand through advocacy for libraries—specifically, by funding new libraries—and also through advocacy for librarians by investing in their educational resources: new schools: dedicated, better trained faculty; modern textbooks; and updated, evidence-based curricula.

Meanwhile, they were decreasing supply by adding de facto regulation in the form of library school accreditation, a limitation on supply that continues today. From the Occupational Outlook Handbook, Edition entry for librarians :. School librarians may not need an MLS but must meet State teaching license requirements…. States generally have certification requirements for librarians in public schools and local libraries, though there are wide variations among States.

In addition, over half of all States require that school librarians hold teacher certifications, although not all require teaching experience.

Some States may also require librarians to pass a comprehensive assessment. Most States also have developed certification standards for local public libraries, although in some States these guidelines are voluntary. These are not the only conditions minimizing competition and protecting working librarians from termination.

Librarians may also belong to a union, earn tenure or quasi-tenure , or hold Civil Service commissioned positions. While occupational licensing among librarians is not as organized as it is in fields like medicine or law or the financial industry , it may be worth investigating if librarianship could benefit from more licensing or less, and, if any licensing at all is beneficial either to the public, to librarians, or both , how it might best be organized.

Finally, it seems worth investigating who is educating librarians and how the educators have themselves been taught. Library science is part humanities, part social science, and, at times in the past, and perhaps in the near future as well, part information science, and even computer science.

Figuring out how these tensions might be balanced has everything to do not only with the producing an appropriate supply of new librarians, but also ensuring these new librarians have the requisite skills to meet the demands of the marketplace. And thanks to Emily for helping me with the final draft as well. Chicago: American Library Association. Read all about it! Pingback : Is there a glut of newly minted librarians?

I had long suspected that Library Science programs were producing more graduates than the job market could support. As to academic rigor, I can say from personal experience that my MLIS program was a cakewalk compared to my other masters in the humanities. The thought that some schools see online programs as profit-generating models of education worries me I do not know if they do, but I suspect as much.

Actually John, online ALA accredited degrees count the same as any other though other schools obviously have better reputations than other. Why do I need to actually be at class at 9 a. There are undoubtedly online programs that are simply meant to make money Phoenix, etc. When you think about it, it costs the school very little to teach a library school student; very little specialized equipment is needed compared to programs in medicine or the sciences. As a result, universities see library students as giant dollar signs that contribute just as many tuition dollars as students in more expensive to teach fields, and as a result, they increase their numbers in order to increase revenue.

Once they graduate, the university does not care what happens to them. Online programs only propagate this problem because there are no limitations as to how many students can squeeze into a physical classroom. Higher education is increasingly about making money. And universities can make money off of library school students, so they keep admitting them, leading to a surplus.

As a result, only the top few get jobs, leaving a huge number of degreed librarians without a future within the field. Library schools are suffering financially, due to the facts that a. At a large midwestern university with a prominent library school, the university actually loses money on each student this is also true of its other professional programs like social work and journalism. One told me that he only wanted to manage a large academic library.

He was entry-level! Another was waiting for the perfect academic job cataloging serials. Roger, your arguments are not true across the board. Simmons, for example, has been experiencing significant financial difficulties as an institution over the last few years; the library program is actually one of the only ones at the school turning a profit. I also disagree that library school students have a disproportionate number of students on assistantships; nearly every student who enters a PhD program in the humanities or sciences is going to be fully funded, which is definitely not the case in MLS programs.

Social Explorer An online demographic research tool, Social Explorer revolutionizes the way researchers, scholars, and students interact with data. Read More. By Andrew A. Median Earnings The Census Bureau has kept records of librarian wages since A Feminine Profession Today, 83 percent of librarians are women, but in the s men had the edge, making up 52 percent of the librarians enumerated.

Numbers of working female librarians Gender and Education Wage Differences Librarians working full-time earned more than the national median income in and , but incomes dipped below the national median in Race The librarian field has been and continues to be a predominately white profession.

Marriage In , one in three librarians were married. Education In , when education data for librarians debuted, 45 percent of librarians had completed at least four years of college. Age Librarians skew older with 64 percent of them 45 years or older, and 40 percent of them over 55 years old. Public and private In , 37 percent of librarians worked in the private or nonprofit sector while 62 percent worked in a public setting the remaining 1 percent were self-employed. Conclusion Starting from a very small beginning, librarians grew into a large profession after in the mid th Century.

Notes: This analysis, which is preliminary, is based upon the original Census materials organized by the Minnesota Population Center. Available at www. In the samples include all of the Census responses in the entire country. Most decades the data only include a sample, generally one or five percent.

As such the results presented are subject to sampling error, as well as issues related to Census response in general. Work is underway to make it possible for analyses such as this to be conducted in Social Explorer funded by the National Institutes of Health. The median represents the person in the distribution who is in the exact middle.

It is usually used rather than average to depict typical wages and salaries. Subscribe to the OUPblog via email: Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities. Recent Comments. Francine Fialkoff 20 th June Mary Whisner 21 st June Swiss Army Librarian » Librarians in the U.

Katelyn Patterson 21 st June JG 27 th June New Librarians in the U. Librarians in America: years of census data 25 th July Words and links on the Week… Sociable Ink 5 th August Fusenews: Horton hears too much. He must be dealt with. Chaingang: August 8, the lisa chronicles. Brad Wirz 22 nd August Destinee 28 th November In Michigan, there was a 36 percent drop.

But there are states where the number of librarians has risen; at the top of the list is Idaho, where there are percent more librarians. On that basis, with 2. But then again, there were only librarians in Owensboro we tested the accuracy of the data and estimate that the real number of librarians is somewhere between 88 and