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The American Library Association (ALA) has so many sub-groups – including divisions, chapters, committees, discussion groups, and round tables to name a few – that you can probably be forgiven if you aren’t quite sure what the Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) is, or what it does. But pay attention: underfunded and undermarketed, ALA-APA is nevertheless committed to accomplish what years of hit-and-miss effort have not. They want to raise the salaries and job prospects of librarians.
Established in 2002, ALA-APA is somewhat unusual in that it has no members. Launched with a loan from ALA (and sharing governance via ALA’s Council), ALA-APA’s revenue model relies on donations, newsletter subscriptions, sales of its salary surveys, and certification fees to sustain itself financially.
APA currently provides these benefits to the library profession:
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•Publication of a monthly online newsletter (Library Worklife),
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•Collection and analysis of national salary data, published annually as salary surveys;
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•Provision of a certification program for MLS-holders in public libraries who would like further training in management and certification of these advanced skills, and
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•Support for salary initiatives at the institutional, regional, and national levels as well as at the individual level.
In addition, ALA-APA has just announced the creation of the ALA-APA Union Wiki, a user-contributed wiki intended as a resource for both current union members and library professionals seeking information about joining or starting a union.
How valuable are these benefits to you as an LIS professional, and how might you use them to help build your career?
Library Worklife. If you’re an avid reader of the Rachel Singer Gordon’s monthly online Info Career Trends newsletter and Priscilla Shontz’s LIScareer, you’ll find additional career-related, practical information in Library Worklife. It features articles on career advancement, certification, human resources practice, pay equity, recruitment, research, work/life balance and a section on support staff concerns. Each issue includes articles (occasionally excerpted or adapted from other publications) of interest to library administrators, policy-makers, and individual librarians. For example, a recent issue featured, among others, these articles: “Ignored Too Long: The Benefits of Managing a Library with a Union, Part III,” “Got Skills? Skillshares Facilitate Communication among LIS Professionals,” “Professional Development: Online Resources,” and “Getting to Know You: How to Effectively Introduce Yourself in a New Job.”
How valuable is this to your ongoing career development? Actually, the information is pretty useful because it places career development and advancement within an institutional and profession-level context. It’s not going to help you land that first job, but once you’ve got it, these articles may help you navigate issues such as budget crises, salary negotiations, and professional networking from a broader perspective.
An annual subscription to the newsletter costs $15 for students, $35 for individual ALA members, and $60 for non-ALA members (ALA institutional members receive Library Worklife for free).
The Salary Surveys. According to a recent ALA-APA press release, “Almost 4,000 public and academic libraries are being asked to participate in the 2007 ALA-APA Library Salary Survey.” Results will include both MLS-librarian and non-MLS library staff results, and will note both full- and part-time employment. The data is broken down by 68 positions.
This is a continuation of the salary information collected by ALA since 1982, and is soon to result in a new resource called the Library Salary Database, which will be accessible via a one-month or annual subscription. It will be especially valuable to HR directors and others in charge of making hiring and compensation issues, but depending on the final pricing options, may also be useful to professionals trying to determine where their salary falls within the context of other comparable salary data.
The Certification Program. This program is designed for MLS-holders in public libraries who have been working in management positions for at least three years and would like to increase their management knowledge and proficiency. The Certified Public Library Administrator (CPLA) program is the result of a collaboration among ALA’s Public Library Association (PLA), Library Administration and Management Association (LAMA) and Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies (ASCLA) divisions, who together established the program’s core “proficiencies.” (Although the initial program has targeted MLS-holding library professionals, a certificate for Support Staff is also in the works.
The CPLA certification requires individuals to demonstrate proficiency in seven management and administrative functions. Four are required -- Budget and Finance, Management of Technology, Organization and Personnel Administration, and Planning and Management of Buildings. An additional three are chosen from among Current Issues, Marketing, Politics and Networking, Fundraising, and Service to Diverse Populations. Courses are offered in person or online by library associations, library schools and consultants.
What are the costs? Participation in CPLA requires a $250 non-refundable fee for ALA members and $300 for non-members. Each course/standard review is $45 for ALA members and $65 for non-members. There is a final review fee; the total cost is $610 for ALA members and $820 for non-members, not including the cost of the individual courses. Course costs average $250.00. The fees are paid by the individual, institution or both.
The certification offers two strong benefits from a career-advancement vantage point. The first is that getting more education, especially in management and leadership areas, will almost always position you for more and better opportunities within library and information organizations –opportunities that almost always pay better, as well. The second is that a CPLA certification provides concrete documentation of all sorts of useful things – for example, that you take your professional development seriously, that you are committed to improving your value and ability to contribute to the organization, and that you have a good reason to be asking for that promotion and/or pay raise.
“There are two additional points of interest,” notes Director Brady. “Only half of the states have what is called a certification, and librarians achieve certification by methods ranging from mailing in a copy of your graduate diploma and $5 to taking continuing education courses. The ALA-APA programs are national, portable and rigorous. The second point of interest is that most courses can be taken by anyone, even if you are not a public librarian or interested in completing the CPLA program.”
Raising Salaries. ALA-APA is working to help raise librarians’ salaries in three ways. First, it provides advocacy tools that they can use to “make the case” for higher salaries, for example, the video “Working@Your Library: For Love or Money” and the “Better Salaries and Pay Equity Toolkit.” Second, on its website, it has aggregated resources – such as discussion lists, salary surveys, and a pay equity bibliography – to provide both information and opportunities for information sharing on this critical topic. Third, its offers a series of salary-related sessions at the annual ALA conference, all of which focus on actionable strategies for improving your bottom line.
The Union Wiki. According to ALA-APA director Jennifer Grady, “Unions are one of many ways library workers may improve salaries.” Since ALA-APA cannot get involved in collective bargaining, one way to further its goal of improving salaries is to help empower others to raise their salaries and benefits. Notes Grady, “Union membership is one of many ways to do this. By being part of a union, library workers gain local allies who can help them achieve pay equity and better salaries.”
Check out the wiki for articles on union current events, answers to frequently asked questions about unions, and links to other wikis and blogs. Whether you’re a public, school, or academic library professional, if you’re interested in the role of unions in the library-salaries debate, this is a great place to start.
Reality Check
All good initiatives; the question is, how successful are they likely to be? The reality check: in general, public, school, and often academic libraries have been struggling with budget cuts for years, and they rarely have the political leverage to demand that salaries be increased. Instead, more and more library administrators are balancing their constrained budgets through attrition: as older MLS-holding librarians retire (at a much slower rate than had been anticipated), their positions are often restructured to support hiring lower-paid non-professionals.
This means that generally, when it comes to professional librarians, it’s an employers’ market, which further depresses salaries. The law of supply and demand is definitely not working in our favor, nor is it likely to in the foreseeable future. Consider it a variation on the economic trickle-down theory: libraries are insufficiently valued, so they are underfunded, so librarians are underpaid.
Can this cycle be overturned? I believe it can, but we haven’t quite found the right formula yet – perhaps it will be a mix of finding new opportunities for community value-add, creating radically more effective branding and visibility, and pushing community impact as the highest measure of a library’s effectiveness. When key decision-makers within multiple constituencies decide that they can’t be successful without their librarians (as opposed to their library), then they’ll get behind pay raises. But it means librarians will have to start building relationships both inside and outside of the library, which if I recall isn’t a high priority in our MLIS curricula. Perhaps an issue for ALISE to consider?
But in the meantime, ALA-APA is trying to do what many ALA members (including me) have hoped ALA would do for many years – advocate for librarians as strongly as it’s advocated for libraries. Led by Director Jenifer Grady, ALA-APA has 1.5 staff members and a host of committee volunteers who are determined to create tools and resources and programs that will support a better future for library professionals – those working now and those we’ll hope to recruit.
Does ALA-APA have the clout of a well-funded lobbying machine? Not a chance. Is it likely to be able to secure a minimum $40,000 salary for all librarians? Not likely, at least not immediately. But is it a valuable resource, a long-needed advocate for librarians unskilled at advocating for themselves? Absolutely. ALA-APA deserves our support, both financial and moral, for at least trying to improve things. I sent off my check for $35 today to subscribe to the newsletter, and will be contributing an article soon as part of my support of the ALA-APA’s goals. It’s a start.
Key Resources:
ALA-APA
ALA-APA Certification
ALA-APA Union Wiki
(Password for editing: apaedits)
Library Worklife: HR E-News for Today’s Leaders
Also:
Info Career Trends
LIScareer
Thursday, March 1, 2007
What is the ALA-APA, and Why Should You Care?
