Introduction: Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science

Beyond buildings, collections, and services, the library and information science (LIS) workforce is key to the success of many aspects of a knowledge economy. LIS professionals partner with educators in the instruction of youth and young adults, support reading and information literacy required for productive participation in society over the life course, enable research and development through access to research findings and translational systems, and promote commerce through Web development and organization and retrieval of information, to name just a few of their service objectives. Whereas librarianship has a long history as a profession, the expanded field of library and information science presents many new opportunities for information professionals to work in non-library settings.

Occupational employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2008) estimate that there are 151,170 librarians, 113,510 library technicians, 5,330 archivists, and 3,960 library science post-secondary faculty in the workforce (not including self-employed workers). The American Library Association (2009) estimates the number employed in academic, public, and school libraries at 329,941. Library and information science professionals working outside of libraries are much harder to identify and their numbers tend to be spread among various occupational categories. The U.S. National Center for Education Statistics (2008) reports that there were 6,767 master's degrees in library science conferred by degree-granting institutions in the academic year 2006–7. While the number of degrees has been slowly increasing since the late 1990s, the supply of new graduates does not appear to be adequate for the number of retirements that will take place as the baby boomers leave the workforce. According to Dohm (2000), the impact of the retirement of seventy-six million boomers on U.S. labor supply will be greatest in the decade following 2008. As shown in table 1, Dohm (2000) presented Bureau of Labor Statistics data that placed librarians seventh on a list of occupations with the highest percentage of workers aged forty-five years and older in 1998, at which time the median age of librarians was forty-seven, compared to age thirty-nine for all twenty-four occupations on the list.

Concern continues to be expressed about potential LIS workforce shortages, given the expected baby boomer retirements, and the need for increased recruitment, diversity, succession planning, and leadership development in the profession. Less attention has been paid to retention of LIS professionals at various career stages, although this is another strategy that is worthy of consideration, given the nature of the workforce challenges that lie ahead. Given this concern, it is an ideal time for an issue of Library Trends that begins to take stock of some of the major issues related to the LIS workforce and to lay a foundation for future research and workforce planning at all levels.

In 2004, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) initiated the 21st Century Librarian Program, which made workforce research a priority. In the same year, IMLS funded a national study on the Future of Librarians in the Workforce being conducted by Griffiths, et al. (www.libraryworkforce.org). The national study aims to project the supply and demand for librarians and to provide data from a wide variety of surveys of libraries, library employees, employers, career counselors, educators, and other groups. In 2005, IMLS funded another large scale workforce study by Marshall, et al. (www.wilis.unc.edu), which provided an in-depth look at the careers of graduates of the six LIS programs in North Carolina from 1964–2007. A follow-up study known as WILIS 2 is using the recent graduates' portion of the full retrospective career study as a basis for creating an alumni tracking survey that a wide range of LIS programs can potentially use.

Other major LIS research studies have also been undertaken by the 8Rs Research Team in Canada (2005) and the Colorado State Library (Steffen, Lance, Russell, & Lietzau, 2004). In 2004, the Archival Census and Education Needs Survey in the United States, also funded by IMLS, was conducted by the Society of...