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.