7 SALARY SURVEY TRENDS 2005-06 The ARL Annual Salary Survey 2005-06 reports salary data for all professional staff working in ARL libraries. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) represents the interests of libraries that serve major North American research institutions. The Association operates as a forum for the exchange of ideas and as an agent for collective action to influence forces affecting the ability of these libraries to meet the future needs of scholarship. The ARL Statistics and Measurement program, which produces the Salary Survey, is organized around collecting, analyzing, and distributing quantifiable information describing the characteristics of research libraries. The ARL Annual Salary Survey is the most comprehensive and thorough guide to current salaries in large U.S. and Canadian academic and research libraries, and is a valuable management and research tool. Data for 9,655 professional staff members were reported this year for the 113 ARL university libraries, including their law and medical libraries (913 staff members reported by 71 medical libraries and 746 staff members reported by 75 law libraries). For the 10 nonuniversity ARL members, data were reported for 3,921 professional staff members. The tables are organized in seven major sections. The first section includes Tables 1 through 4, which report salary figures for all professionals working in ARL member libraries, including law and medical library data. The second section includes salary information for the 10 nonuniversity research libraries of ARL. The third section, entitled “ARL University Libraries,” reports data in Tables 7 through 25 for the “general” library system of the university ARL members, combining U.S. and Canadian data but excluding law and medical data. The fourth section, composed of Tables 26 through 30, reports data on U.S. ARL university library members excluding law and medical data the fifth section, Tables 31–34, reports data on Canadian ARL university libraries excluding law and medical data. The sixth section (Tables 35–41) and the seventh section (Tables 42–48) report on medical and law libraries, respectively, combining U.S. and Canadian data. The university population is generally treated in three distinct groups: staff in the “general” library system, staff in the university medical libraries, and staff in the university law libraries. Any branch libraries for which data were received, other than law and medical, are included in the “general” category, whether or not those libraries are administratively independent. Footnotes for many institutions provide information on branch inclusion or exclusion. In all tables where data from U.S. and Canadian institutions are combined, Canadian salaries are converted into U.S. dollar equivalents at the rate of 1.24971 Canadian dollars per U.S. dollar.1 Tables 4 and 31 through 34, however, pertain exclusively to staff in Canadian university libraries, so salary data in those tables are expressed in Canadian dollars. 1 This is the average monthly noon exchange rate published in the Bank of Canada Review for the period July 2004-June 2005 and is used in converting 2005-06 figures that are collected as of July 2005.