LJ Series "Job Satisfaction": I ♥ Librarianship

Why choose librarianship as a career? Seventeen percent of public librarians responding to this question in LJ’s Job Satisfaction Survey began their answers with the words “I love....” And not for nothing: 70% reported being either “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with their jobs vs. the 31% who said they were “somewhat satisfied” or “not satisfied at all.” Respondents with the greatest number of years in the field tended to express the highest levels of satisfaction, and, most promising for the future of the profession, 87% of all public library respondents said they would recommend it as a career to someone just entering college. Nonetheless, problems driving down satisfaction remain. Here, in exactly the state of mind and point in their profession we found them when we called, several of these respondents voice specific satisfactions and grievances.

When it comes to supporting diversity and equity in the profession, the survey results show both good news and bad. While an astounding 78% of Hispanic librarians report being “very satisfied” with the profession, far fewer white librarians (33%) and Asian librarians (31%) are as happy, and only 13% of black librarians claim the top level of satisfaction. “Most librarians of color get no mentoring whatsoever, either formal or informal,” said a fortysomething technical services librarian (affiliation unnamed).

A persistent gender gap exists as well. Men are more likely than women to be library directors (though they reported slightly fewer advancement opportunities on the whole—37% vs. 42%, respectively) and earn 12% higher salaries than women overall. Despite this, women reported greater job satisfaction, greater likelihood of retiring in the position, and a greater willingness to recommend librarianship to others. Women may derive more personal fulfillment from the family-friendly nature of the profession and the public service inherent in it, as well as being part of a professional community of peers. Their job satisfaction also may stem from entrenched perceptions. “Traditionally librarians undervalue themselves and traditionally women, too, undervalue what they do, and I’m subject to that on both ends.... But who really gets paid equitably?” says Jeanette Piquet, director of the Richmond Heights Memorial Library, MO, who is married to a teacher.

Whatever their ethnicity or gender and regardless of their satisfaction level, most respondents agreed that the part of their jobs they felt least prepared for was politics and chain of command. One second-career librarian heading a large urban Mid-Atlantic library expressed her frustration that in her previous, lower position she was free to collaborate and communicate across the library, but in her current, ostensibly higher one, she must go through numerous channels. Specifically, she asked, “How can you present solutions when you have no access to the people who could implement them?” A twentysomething supervisor at a medium-sized urban library in the South shared her exasperation at “having to work with so many different departments to get something accomplished.”

Knock the problem down a notch from the supervisor’s perspective, and, as one adult-services librarian at a large urban West Coast library tells LJ, this failure to communicate across ranks can lead to a real disconnect between what the administration sees and what librarians experience on the floor. “They don’t know, and they don’t want to know,” he says. “They just want to continue to fund and build new libraries where if the new building has 70% of the shelf space the old one did, that’s progress.”

Such complaints are most common to urban and large libraries, so we homed in on one rural library in a small Tennessee town (population: 600) to see how a librarian might be making out with zero departmental structure to hinder or help her. Lonetta Beshears operates the Sunbright Public Library out of a 960 square foot double-wide trailer. She has been its director for 26 years, since high school, and in that time has fought successfully to double Sunbright’s operating hours (from six to 12 per week, including Saturdays). In one recent year, Beshears tells LJ, the state was unable to provide her library with any funding and also temporarily suspended a lease program through which she would have received five books monthly. Things looked hopeful in 2006, when the state had a $120 million surplus of funds. Beshears applied for a grant, as she does every year, but the money went elsewhere; the library received nothing that year beyond the usual $833 from the state (for materials) and another $50 from the county (for supplies).

“I deal with it,” Beshears says pragmatically. Yet she expresses a high level of job satisfaction, a happy reality that at once contradicts and supports our survey’s findings: while the greatest number of dissatisfied respondents (11% and 12%, respectively) work in the South and Southwest, most “very satisfied” respondents (73%) hail from rural areas. Asked to account for the discrepancy between her high satisfaction and her low means, Beshears doesn’t hesitate: “The regular patrons, the ones who really appreciate the library.”

Patrons make the job worthwhile

In this, Beshears is not alone: the majority of respondents identified their chief job satisfaction as “helping people.” Richmond Heights’ Piquet sees that playing out in her library as well, which, in contrast to Sunbright, is open 35 hours a week and serves a population of nearly 100,000. The highlight of her 20 years in the profession, however, happened at the reference desk of the St. Louis Public Library, when a woman asked Piquet for a book on English grammar so that she could better communicate with her English professor boyfriend. Here was her library, says Piquet, “enriching patrons’ lives by helping them with the most basic of things: finding love.”

Patrons have been known to return the favor, even in the most dire situations. During a 2001 budget hearing for the Canyon Area Library, TX, when one man proposed closing the library down, several community members grouped together and raised the majority of funds to build a new, though much smaller, county-approved facility. While the library took a hit on square footage, it kept a toehold despite its ongoing struggle, shared by peers nationwide, to make the library matter to city officials. As Director Sarah Munger tells LJ, the city’s budget has nearly quadrupled in the seven years since, though the library is still, she admits, “at the bottom” of the city’s list of priorities.

Like so many public libraries, Canyon Area balances on the precipice between goodwill and whim: Munger fears one funding source from the county “can go away in the blink of an eye,” and she has seen the change from one library-using city manager to another, non-library-using city manger translate into books being considered as capital expenditures.

Beshears’s and Munger’s financial dilemmas echo our finding that suburban and rural public libraries’ foremost institutional challenge is funding (39.6% and 32.5%, respectively) and foremost personal on-the-job challenge is budget constraints (39.8% and 32.3%, respectively). “You do everything you can—advocacy, networking,” one former director of a rural Southern library tells LJ, “and, still, not one penny of increase.”

In such cases, city council members get their share of blame (one librarian recalls a city manager asking, “Do we even need books anymore? Don’t people just use the Internet now?”), as do board members—“doing things well and thoroughly and altruistically is no longer important,” wrote another librarian in our survey; “doing things fast and cheap is.”

Mary Anne Marjamaa, manager of extension services at St. Louis County Library, sees board responsiveness as one of librarians’ greatest frustrations. You know you’re in trouble, she says, “when your system crawls to a stop at 2 p.m., and you need more bandwidth, but you don’t have a board that understands or supports getting more” (St. Louis recently got a new director and board).

That’s not to say the funding and budgetary crunch is equally felt. One respondent from a large West Coast library described her budget as “healthy.” Another, from a mid-sized library in the Northwest, attested to having “an excellent board that allows me to do my job without undue interference.” (Respondents in the Midwest and South were most likely to identify funding as their greatest on-the-job challenge—35% and 19%, respectively; those in the Southwest and Mountain states were less likely to—7% and 4%, respectively.)

As to how funding issues correlate with overall job satisfaction, among respondents who said funding was their top institutional challenge, the majority were either “very satisfied” (31%) or “satisfied” (38%) with their jobs, compared to the 27% who said they were “somewhat satisfied” and 5% who were “not satisfied at all.” Resolving the funding issue, then, might just help push that top number up. A more complex fiscal issue is compensation.

Fifty-five percent of respondents consider themselves underpaid: those “not at all satisfied” earn an average of $47,300, while those “very satisfied” earn $55,000. (Still, good pay, admittedly well-paid Los Angeles Public Library adult services librarian Ted Kane tells LJ, can only be stretched so far: “You can’t really get paid enough to get insulted,” he says, referring to his own greatest on-the-job frustration, confrontational patrons.)

Our highest-paid respondents—mostly library directors—frequently couched their satisfaction in terms of the impact they feel they have on their communities. What one library director of a medium-sized West Coast library whose salary is in the $150,000–$174,999 range appreciates most about her job is “the opportunity to make a difference in a community.” Similarly, the director of a Mid-Atlantic central library who pulls in $125,000–$149,999 a year finds it “very satisfying that I can influence the impact and contributions that the library has upon the community and the county.”

Examined regionally, the correlation between job satisfaction and pay is more complex than one might imagine. Librarians in the Pacific states, our survey found, earn the most—on average, $63,300 annually. But these are not our most satisfied respondents. Librarians in New England and the Mid-Atlantic area are. New Englanders earn, on average, $46,300, while Mid-Atlantic folk earn, on average, $57,500. It seems that fair pay, no matter how one defines it, doesn’t alone guarantee satisfaction.

One former library director sheds light on interregional salary discrepancies: she recently left a job in a Southern state, she says, just for the prospect of getting the same job in a contiguous state, all because she could conceivably be making 68% more than she had in her state of choice.

To be sure, no one goes into librarianship for the money. But it is an extraordinary profession that attracts the kind of people who, like one woman we spoke to, chose to take a 30% pay cut to direct a rural Southern library because she “felt like I could make a difference.” Or, like another, who turned down a significantly higher-paying and prestigious position to continue directing a New England public library because “this is where I belong, this is what I love.” For these respondents and others, librarianship is more than just a job.

Yet it’s also difficult to ignore the phenomenon that for the majority of our survey respondents (60%), librarianship has altered drastically since they signed on. As fortysomething, Rebecca Vnuk, head of adult services at Glenn Ellyn Public Library, IL, tells LJ, “Anyone who thinks they’re going to sit in the library behind a desk and answer reference questions all day is sadly mistaken.”

Unsurprisingly, of the 60% of respondents who said their job responsibilities have changed over the last three years, 46% attribute it to advances in technology. And the younger the respondent, the greater degree of comfort he or she expressed with new technologies (e.g., blogging, podcasts, gaming, IM-ing, Second Life, MySpace).

Seventy-four percent of our entire sample of public library respondents have an MLS: of those, 39% believe an MLS is only somewhat important to the work they do, though MLSers, according to our findings, earn 70% more than non-MLSers. Arguments in favor of the degree are convincing. “I’ve seen a lot of paraprofessionals who decide after a while to get their MLS and then go on to work again,” Richmond Heights’ Piquet tells LJ, “and the way they think when they come out of school is different because they’re really and truly thinking about the value of what we do, they’re now devoted to it as a profession instead of just thinking of it as a job.” Marjamaa found that, as a non-MLS-credentialed library assistant, she had “all these ideas that went nowhere.” Now manager of extension services at St. Louis County Library, she says her decision to return to school in 1998 for the degree gave her greater leverage in the field: “Not that my ideas were suddenly any better, but I was able to have more of an impact.”

Like the majority of respondents who believe an MLS is “very important” to the work they do, Bangor Public Library, ME, director Barbara McDade is herself an older, MLS-credentialed library director. “You can talk about customer service, but librarianship goes beyond that: freedom of access, knowing that you can find things and should be able to access them,” she says. “[There are] people who don’t have an MLS who have that attitude, but it’s not the majority.”

Among the minority who sees the degree as purely useful for professional advancement is Carly Wiskoff, a twentysomething technical services librarian working at the Sayville Library, NY. “I have an MLS, and I don’t think it’s vital,” she tells LJ. Then again, she adds, “There is that librarian/paraprofessional wall you just can’t break otherwise.” Glenn Ellyn’s Vnuk has a similar perspective: “On my good days, when I’ve really helped someone with something, I’m happy having gotten it.” But day to day at the reference desk is a different matter: “All I might do one day is fix a broken printer, answer some computer questions. And you do wonder: Was that worth the $30,000 degree?” For one former part-time reference librarian, that consideration is superseded by another, more immediate one: “How do I sustain myself in a career that can’t even pay for the education it took to get it?” he asks.

Now nearing retirement in Maine, Bangor PL’s McDade worries about the next generation of library leaders: “How are they going to find people to fill those positions who are equally as passionate? I’m just not seeing any of them.” (Note: that may partly be because 36% of under-30 respondents live in the Midwest.)

An impressive 81% of twentysomething respondents have the MLS degree McDade so prizes. Yet, this age group reported more instances of age-based discrimination, limited opportunities for advancement, and frustration at not being welcomed, or not being able to find work in the first place.

“There’s not a lot of upward mobility when working in a library environment where no one leaves and the younger people are not as well received,” wrote one young librarian in our survey. Another was more blunt: “Upper management positions are taken until people die or retire, and I can’t wait that long.”

Given that nearly 80% of respondents plan to continue in the profession until retirement and that one-third of the sample have been in it for more than 20 years, that perception is understandable. As one older head librarian of a medium-sized Northwestern library puts it, the field is in “a log jam.” Not everyone gets caught in that log jam, however. Eva Pomeroy, outreach services supervisor at the Traveler’s Rest–Sargent Branch of the Greenville County Public Library, SC, is an example of just how swiftly young talent can rise. The MLS-accredited Pomeroy made the jump from Librarian I to Librarian IV in five years and now manages a staff of nine.

Still, the profession suffers from a real problem of integrating new blood, especially when considered from the viewpoint of new, have-a-degree-and-want-to-be-a-librarian librarians. “At the time I entered the field, there was a rumor going around that all these baby boomers were retiring and all these positions suddenly were becoming available,” says Brian Story, who, with degree in hand, had to quit two part-time jobs as a reference librarian at a public and academic library, respectively, in the rural Mid-Atlantic because too few hours were available, and he couldn’t live on the pay (21% of the reference librarians in our sample, like Story, work part-time).

Today, Story runs a card and gift shop at which he hopes to introduce elements from library life—such as “Story Time with Mr. Story.” In the meantime, he tells LJ, there is a “lighthouse” in his corner of the world: the Saratoga Public Library, NY, where he’s applied “several times” for a position. That few good jobs in the field open up makes sense to Story. After all, he asks, “Who would want to leave a library?”