In my various social circles, I’ve been talking about my upcoming “mid-tenure.” I’m sure my friends in academic institutions know what I am talking about, but I also have friends who are not in academic libraries, and I even have friends who are not (gasp!) librarians at all who probably have little to no idea what I’m babbling on about. So, I want to give a brief overview of what it is and what the process has been like in my place of work.

In the most general sense, tenure invovles successfully completing some kind of probationary period in order to make one’s job more or less permanent. Most employment situations have this even if they don’t call it such.

In many academic work places, usually just for faculty, this “probationary period” is much longer, usually in the neighborhood of 5 to 7 years. The point of this long period of time is to give the faculty member time to prove his or her worth and a scholar, teacher and/or researcher. I put “probationary period” in quotes because even though the position is not permanent, it usually is a contract position. Most often, a person in this position is on a yearly contract that more or less automatically gets renewed unless there are extenuating circumstances.

When faculty members are “up for tenure,” they need to provide evidence of their achievements. A board of tenured faculty members evaluates the work and decides whether or not they have achieved enough to be granted tenure and be given permanent employment.

Many places have a mid-tenure review, which is what I’m heading into and have been talking about. At my library, mid-tenure candidates go through the motions of applying for tenure in order to get feedback from tenured librarians regarding our progress toward tenure. The process for mid-tenure stays within the library. When I am up for tenure, my work gets evaluated at the campus level.

Whether or not librarians should be considered faculty and whether or not they should be held to the same standards as teaching and research faculty is a Ginormous Can of Worms which I am not going to get into here.

Getting one’s work scrutinized is stressful, but the mid-tenure process is meant to be helpful. What candidates gets from the process is constructive feedback on how well their work is progressing and on what they may need to do in the next couple of years to make getting tenure much more likely.

At my library, the process involves a few things, which, I would assume are fairly similar to those at other institutions.

• As a state funded university, there is a form to fill out in which we provide an overview of our education and work.
• There is the infamous “packet,” which for us takes the form of a binder. Into this binder, we put any evidence of our accomplishments, including our CVs, annual reviews, annual reports, publications, presentations, the state form and anything else we can think of to help us make our case.
• Our direct supervisors and our tenure committee provide feedback on our binders and we have some time to make revisions.
• The bindesr then go to the administrative office in the library where other librarians can go and review them.
• There is a library faculty meeting where all the candidates field questions about their work so far and plans for improvement.
• Finally, we get feedback from the library Dean and our direct supervisors.

We get evaluated on three general categories:

• Job performance: how well we execute our daily job duties.
• Scholarship: what we’ve published and/or presented. What also gets considered is the quality of the publication or the importance or prestige of the conference where we presented.
• Service: what we have done to provide additional service to the library, university, and professional organizations.

Although I have been working in academic libraries for 17 years (yikes!) and have been a professional librarian for 10, I have only been a tenure-track librarian since taking this job in 2007. The tenure process is still somewhat new to me. I would be interested to hear what the process is like at other libraries.

I have joined the ranks of the other fabulous people in accepting a Shover and Maker award. The brainchild of some of the wonderful Library Society of the World people (Josh Neff and Steve Lawson), the award is a supplement, if you will, to the yearly Movers and Shakers Awards put out by Library Journal every year.

This project, as with all the LSW efforts, is another excellent example of various librarians sharing and celebrating their accomplishments. And real beauty is that you too are a winner.

Despite being in a techy environment, I’m not always easily impressed by new technology. But this is really cool: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Here’s another comment about the library world coming from outside the library world. Thomas Hawk, the excellent photographer of Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connections, comments on Sony’s assertion that its new book reader is “sexier than a librarian:”

“Sony says that their new book reader thingy is “sexier than a librarian.” There is just no way I’m buying that one. Nice try though Sony. I’m sure the reader’s probably just fine *but* no way is it sexier than a librarian.”

There also are some funny comments on his photo hosting site. I leave it up to you to decide the level of sarcasm.

Always great to see a non-academic source talk about how great libraries are. From Kyle Western’s sidebar about democracy in the July/August 2007 issue of Men’s Health:

“President Franklin D. Roosevelt noted that public libraries are ‘essential to the functioning of a democratic society.’ But libraries are often first to go when local budgets are cut. Support yours by always paying your fines and by donating used books, CD-ROMs, and DVDs. And instead of buying from Amazon, check librarybooksales.org first–it sells books from local libraries across the country. Back your library and you’ll strengthen the state economy, too: a South Carolina study found the return on investment for every $1 spent on public libraries was $4.48–that’s nearly 350 percent.”

Of course, instead of buying a book from Amazon, you can just check it out of your library.

I have been remiss in keeping my blogroll up-to-date. I have slighted many fine blogs by subscribing but not linking to them here. By way of apology, I have just added the following:

• “Self-Plagiarism is Style”
• Adventures in Library School
• Cliff Landis.net
• David’s Random Stuff
• The Days & Nights of The Lipstick Librarian
• I Am A Librarian
• InfoToday Blog
• Pegasus Librarian
• Pop Culture Librarian
• Space Age Librarian

The AIDS Library here in Philadelphia is looking for donation to help stock their library.  You can read about the good work they do here.  If you are interested in helping out, you can click on the “Help Restock the Library” link on their homepage which will take you directly to their Amazon Wish List.

The student that was tasered in the UCLA library is filing a brutality suit against UCLA, according to the LATimes.

I haven’t been paying all that much attention to the ongoing conversations about setting up library profiles in Facebook or MySpace, so this might be old news, but there has been some interesting talk on the ili-l listserv. Apparently, libraries have been suspended from Facebook because they violate the user aggreement. The aggreement has a regulation about not impersonating and entity.

You can find the thread here.

I just used Toronto Public Library’s Ask a Librarian service (so much better than a long distance call, no?) to find out if non-residents (i.e. me) can get Internet access and we (i.e. I) can. So, in addition to the free wireless hotspots, I’ll be able to keep in touch with my class and update Tombrarian at the public library. Long live public libraries!