15 Libraries are facing serious human resources issues as the need to hire professionals with advanced technological skills and the demand for these skills pushes salaries up while libraries seem unable to adjust their salary structures beyond accounting for inflation. As people are hired with higher beginning salaries, the inability to adjust the overall salary structure to achieve some equity for the experienced staff members is another factor that contributes to slow salary growth. This, combined with other evidence from the ARL Statistics, shows libraries’ proportion of materials and operating expenditures increasing faster than salaries, providing a future picture of libraries with fewer staff members, who are in turn being paid salaries that are fighting to keep up with inflation. Readers are reminded that these data reflect only salaries, and that there are other compensation issues, which may have influenced the pattern of salaries in various institutions. In addition, a highly standardized structure for capturing data has been used, which may portray results in a way that cannot be fully representative of a local situation. Martha Kyrillidou Mark Young Association of Research Libraries May 1, 2006
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