ARL Annual Salary Survey 2023

Abstract

The ARL Annual Salary Survey 2023 reports salary data for all professional staff working in ARL libraries including librarians and nonlibrarian professionals. The Association of Research Libraries is a membership organization of libraries and archives in major public and private universities in Canada and the US, as well as US federal government agencies and large public institutions. ARL is a forum for the exchange of ideas and a catalyst for collective action to create, share, and sustain our global knowledge. The Research and Analytics program, which produces the Salary Survey, pursues a research agenda for the Association, collecting and analyzing data on all aspects of research libraries’ roles in scholarly and scientific production, learning facilitation and learner success, and knowledge access and sustainability. The ARL Annual Salary Survey is the most comprehensive and thorough guide to current salaries in large US and Canadian academic and research libraries and is a valuable management and research tool. Data for 11,118 professional staff members were reported this year for the 120 ARL university libraries, including their law and medical libraries (843 staff members reported by 72 medical libraries and 701 staff members reported by 75 law libraries). For six of the seven nonuniversity ARL members, data were reported for 2,044 professional staff members. The university population is generally treated in three distinct groups: staff in the “general” library system, staff in university medical libraries, and staff in university law libraries. Any branch libraries for which data were received, other than law and medical, are included in the “general” category, whether or not those libraries are administratively independent. Footnotes for many institutions provide information on branch inclusion or exclusion. In all tables where data from US and Canadian institutions are combined, Canadian salaries are converted into US dollar equivalents at the rate of 1.3398 Canadian dollars per US dollar.1 Tables 3, 22, and 23, however, pertain exclusively to staff in Canadian university libraries, so salary data in those tables are expressed in Canadian dollars.