Sarah M. Horowitz and Colleen W. Barrett have written an article that is squarely after my own heart. In it, they attempt to determine whether or not common beliefs about special collections career paths are actually true. So many of our hiring practices are based on received wisdom, but if we want to make better choices for ourselves and if we want our workplaces to improve, we need to be able to understand what’s actually happening. That’s a foundation for my own work here on Hiring Librarians, and I’m so happy to be able to share their work with you here.
I think you will find the following post very interesting, and if you’d like to read more, see the following citation:
Horowitz, S., & Barrett, C. (2023). So You Want to Be a Leader? Examining Pathways to Special Collections Administration. College & Research Libraries, 84(5), 678. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.84.5.678
The research questions represented in this article originate from several casual conversations held at an RBMS (Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, which is part of the Association of College and Research Libraries) Conference. These conferences are one of the only times a significant number of special collections librarians are all in one place at the same time, which often leads to mentorship conversations and occasions where more senior members of the profession describe how to get into special collections administration for those currently in or nearing midcareer. From our experience, a few suggestions are often offered as undeniable truths. You will need a second subject masters degree in addition to an MLS. You will have an easier time getting hired into administration if you were originally based in technical services because you will already have supervisory experience with staff. Upward movement is only possible through leaving one institution for another. Finally, there is also a belief that whatever type of library you start out in will be the type of library you remain in, so if you want to work at a large research institution it is important to start one’s career there. This kind of received wisdom can be very useful for planning future career moves, but it is also hard to know how much of it is actually born out in the job market today. This article was our attempt to determine how much of this “received wisdom” was truly reflected in the reality of those currently holding special collections leadership positions.
We were interested in determining what education leaders had earned and what types of previous jobs lent themselves well to gaining a position in special collections leadership. We also wanted to explore the influence that issues such as gender, type of institution where someone has worked, and geographic location could have on the careers of those in special collections administration. We focused our data collection on special collections administrators within the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Independent Research Libraries Association (IRLA), and well-staffed institutions within the Oberlin Group (small liberal arts college libraries). We wanted to include these three groups because many articles about special collections librarianship tend to focus only on ARL libraries, and because we were curious to see what differences and similarities we would find among differing institutional sizes.
Rather than structure this research as a survey, we decided that creating our own dataset would best serve our needs and allow us to make sure we had data from the types of institutions mentioned above. Surveying special collections administrators could lead to skewed results based on differing response rates, as well as the potential for over-representation of people with certain types of backgrounds or experiences. We also focused on current special collections leaders in positions rather than job advertisements for two main reasons. First, job ads would not have allowed us to gather data around issues such as gender, geography, and professional background. Second, we know that what institutions say they want in a job ad is not always completely correlated with the people hired into those positions, although this is the hoped for goal. We collected data by using library websites and organizational charts to identify the heads of special collections departments. We then used spreadsheets to record information from institutional profiles and LinkedIn, including educational background and information on the last three previous positions held. We coded the previous positions in such a way as to help us identify the types of jobs leaders had previously held by type, in the hope that this would reveal the “pathways” taken by current special collections leaders to their current positions.
Many of our findings were unsurprising or did echo the often-received wisdom and studies from other areas of librarianship. Men are overrepresented in special collections leadership positions given their numbers in the field as a whole. The combination of an MLIS degree and a subject masters was the most common educational background for administrators in ARL and Oberlin institutions, though those holding only an MLS were also well represented. IRLA institutions were an outlier in that most of their leaders had either a PhD or an MLS, not a combination of degrees. Special collections leaders were more likely to have a background in curatorial or technical services work than in public services, though having previous administrative experience was the most frequent form of work experience. When gender was taken into account, the previous position trends remained about the same, though more male special collections administrators had previous public services experience than female ones.
Other findings were more unexpected. For instance, 37.5% of special collections leaders had held their immediately previous position in the same institution, contradicting the “general wisdom” that changing employers is the best or only way to move up in the hierarchy. Where you worked previously did not automatically mean you stayed in that type of institution over your whole career. More special collections administrators had gone from positions in ARL institutions to Oberlin Group institutions than the other way around; over a third of Oberlin group administrators had previously worked at ARL libraries. ILRA administrators had come from other institutional types as well as teaching faculty positions.
This study provides a snapshot of a moment in time in special collections leadership; the field could learn much from the repetition or expansion of such work in the coming years. Our full article also includes a number of questions we would love to see pursued in future research.
Colleen W. Barrett is the Rare Books Librarian at the University of Kentucky’s Special Collections Research Center, where she curates the rare books collection and serves as administrator for the King Library Press. She is actively involved with the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, and the Bibliographical Society of America. Her research interests include the history of American book collecting, bibliographic presses, and special collections organizational structures.
Sarah M. Horowitz is Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts and Head of Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford College. She was the 2023-2024 chair of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. Her research interests include special collections organizational structures, assessment of primary source literacy, and illustrated books, particularly of the late 19th century.