The 2009 - 2010 Continuing Status/Tenure Committee met in Washington, D.C., on Saturday July 25. The first order of business was to review our charge. We spent some time discussing how to best maintain the ALL-SIS website, as well as discussing how to develop a White Paper. The White Paper would focus on showing why continuing status/tenure is valuable to the institution as well as to librarians. While discussing the White Paper, it was mentioned that librarians need to be aware of groups that are trying to change our status so that we can formulate an appropriate response. I found this to be a good point, and one that I never thought of before. The White Paper will take some time, and we will deal with it more in the future.
The remainder of the meeting was spent on revising the survey. Last year, a survey was sent out, but we decided to tweak it this year to make sure that we are focusing on librarian status and not other factors. For example, the previous survey asked about benefits. While this information is informative, the answers are not pertinent to what we are trying to evaluate.
Please look for more updates from the Continuing Status/Tenure Committee in the future.