Item Details

title

Negotiating for Your Future: Using Salary Data to Advocate for Fairer Compensation

author

Keener, Molly

author

Levine, Melissa

author

Wipperman, Sarah

abstract

Copyright librarianship is a small but growing specialization within academic librarianship. Emerging in the early 2000s, the field has grown organically and piecemeal in response to the recognition of the urgent need for dedicated copyright and information policy support, and at some institutions the need for strategic legal guidance distinct from the role of a general counsel’s office. This area of expertise crosses into museums, archives, and other cultural institutions. These positions and responsibilities often fall alongside or within scholarly communication programs or offices, and it is through scholarly communication that many copyright and information policy professionals come to this specialization, at least within libraries. Titles tend to include variations on scholarly communication, copyright, or information policy, with information policy more likely to be paired with "officer" than "librarian." Regardless of the exact title, any permutation typically signals significant responsibility for copyright and information policy work. Salary negotiations are often fraught and befuddling experiences for employees and employers, and this stress is compounded when accurate salary data is unavailable: existing annual salary data for academic librarians is not readily available to individuals; or if available, often aggregated by broad categories of job types. There is a vacuum of salary information for copyright and information policy positions even as there are nascent core competencies. Individuals in these positions are often the only people at their institutions doing this work, complicating efforts to fairly benchmark salaries with peers within the institution and in the profession. Additionally, these positions encompass an array of responsibilities and may require additional qualifications. This absence of data specific to our work is what prompted us to undertake a salary and additional compensation benefits survey of copyright and information policy professionals. In this paper, we share findings from our survey, discuss what the data does–and does not–show, and offer suggestions for how this data may be used to support individuals during negotiations and to inform competitive compensation offers when hiring. We also discuss how the survey may be adapted for use by those working in other niche specializations to conduct their own salary survey assessments.

subject

salary

fringe benefits

compensation

negotiation

libraries

librarians

date

2024-03-14T18:25:25Z (accessioned)

2024-03-14T18:25:25Z (available)

2023 (issued)

identifier

Molly Keener, Melissa Levine, and Sarah Wipperman. (2023). Negotiating for You Future: Using Salary Data to Advocate for Fairer Compensation. Forging the Future: The Proceedings of the ACRL 2023 Conference, 310-325. (citation)

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/103103 (uri)

https://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/conferences/confsandpreconfs/2023/NegotiatingforFuture1.pdf (uri)

language

en_US (iso)

publisher

Association of College and Research Libraries

rights

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ (license)

source

Forging the Future: The Proceedings of the ACRL 2023 Conference

type

Article