Academic Librarian Competency: A Description of Trends in the Peer-Reviewed Journal Literature of 2001- 2005.

Abstract

Describes publishing trends in academic librarian competency articles to providecontext for a later investigation of definitions found in this library and informationscience (LIS) literature. Explores peer-reviewed articles from 2001 – 2005 todetermine: who is writing on academic librarian competency, including anycollaboration; whether there are areas of focus in the literature; if these articlesare published in academic journals and to what degree; whether we incorporateother literatures, especially those relevant to competency; and what other trendsmay be important to an understanding of this topic.Discovers three major areas of focus: management-related with 35 articles, 19education and professional development articles and 12 articles on professionalissues. Most are written by single authors and by authors associated withacademic libraries or library schools. There are only three college-based articles.There is minimal collaboration across boundaries of any kind. Most of theauthors associated with academic libraries are writing the management-relatedarticles. The majority of these authors are US-based. The majority of articles oneducation and continuing professional development are written by authors atlibrary schools. Furthermore, these authors represent a more internationalrepresentation of this topic and a greater degree of international collaborationthan found in the management articles. The authors who wrote articles onprofessional issues are almost equally split between library schools and libraries.The majority of citations of peer-reviewed literature (53%) were to journals withno LIS subject heading in Ulrich’s, illustrating that authors are incorporatingliteratures from outside LIS.

Keywords

• academic librarians
• college librarians
• universities
• librarians
• librarianship
• competencies
• publishing