Perspective on Tenure for I.U. Librarians: How Do We Define and Support Tenure at I.U.?
In a 2011 Indiana University Libraries Faculty Council (IULFC) ballot, librarians voted that promotion and tenure procedures will become campus-specific. Some campuses are in the process of developing procedures and some already have them. No matter how our final procedures will vary campus to campus, we share the bond of academic status and tenure for librarians, and, especially now, we need to think about what these principles mean to us individually and as a faculty. Although our shared criteria for promotion and tenure remain as stated in the Indiana University Faculty Handbook, even those may change as the result of our in-depth review of the tenure process.
Status of the Profession: A 1989 National Survey of Tenure and Promotion Policies for Academic Librarians
A questionnaire surveying institutional tenure and promotion criteria sent to 469 academic libraries yielded 304 usable responses. Findings show that job performance continues to be the most widely recognized factor for evaluating academic librarians' performances, examined in virtually every institution. Research, publication, and service play significant roles, particularly at institutions where librarians hold faculty status. Graduate degrees in addition to the M.L.S. are frequently necessary for promotion in academic rank. Approximately half of the responding institutions judge academic librarians by the same tenure and promotion criteria as other faculty.
Science Buddies: Advancing Informal Science Education
An innovative nonprofit enables scientists to present inspiring project ideas based on their own research to K–12 students, parents, and teachers. Every year, about 10 million North American kindergarten through high school (K–12) students complete a science project. What part of these science projects is the most difficult? Formulating a hypothesis? Designing an experiment? Analyzing data? The answer: None of the above. Science Buddies (www.sciencebuddies.org)—a nonprofit developer of software, content, and other resources for informal science and engineering education—found that students have the most difficulty selecting a topic and doing background research to inform their work. Meanwhile, scientists and engineers interested in advising and inspiring students often do not have a means to connect with them (see the first figure). To Science Buddies, these difficulties presented an ideal challenge, and we applied a business methodology to address them, viewing our users as customers and our output as products.