Attrition among librarians
October 13, 2006 11:01 pm librarianshipOn October 12 at the first Joint Conference of Librarians of Color the American Library Association released “Diversity Counts,” the results of a demographic survey of the ALA membership. It looks at ALA's membership and the profession in terms of age, race, gender and compares changes in the composition of the members' characteristics to the characteristics of the U.S. population. There is much to consider in the 36-page report.
Highlights from the press release:
- About 25 percent of Americans were non-white, compared with 11 percent of credentialed librarians;
- African Americans made up 5 percent of the profession but 12.3 percent of the population;
- Latinos represented 2 percent of the profession and 12.5 percent of the population
- Native Americans were less than 1 percent of the profession and .9 percent of the population; and
- Asian Pacific Islanders were 3 percent of the profession and 3.7 percent of the population.
Many of ALA's diversity recruitment efforts began to take hold in 2000; so the picture in 2006 may be better than these statements indicate.
In a presentation at JCLC on October 12 Denise Davis of ALA's Office for Research and Statistics and Tracie Hall of ALA's Office for Diversity explained the survey's findings and analyzed them. A dramatic yet cryptic finding is that “That credentialed librarians under age 45 comprised almost a third, 30%, of the total for that category in 2000, yet accounted for 44% of credentialed librarians leaving the work force, speaks not so much to an inability to effectively recruit individuals to LIS education and practice as to an inability to effectively retain them.” Davis and Hall could not explain this phenomenon. If it persists, it has chilling implications for the profession and for the long-term health of ALA. Tracie Hall was able to say only that there is “something” in the culture of libraries or librarianship that must explain this. But what?
They did speculate that librarians in the under-45 cohort are leaving for careers in K-12 teaching, social work, and other helping and social services professions. Yet anecdote indicates that K-12 teaching and social work are suffering from similar retention problems. Data confirming, denying, or modifying this would be helpful, especially if that would allow for an explanation that is generational, trans-cultural, or some mix of those. This is a mystery to be solved. It has significant implications for our profession and our associations.
