Salary Survey Trends 2011–2012 · 15 Price Index for Canada, all-items, not seasonally adjusted). Tables 2, 3, and 4 include law and medical library staff in ARL university libraries. In contrast to 2010–2011, these tables indicate that the purchasing power of professionals in the United States did not keep pace with inflation, while the purchasing power of their Canadian counterparts did keep pace with inflation. The median salary for US ARL university libraries in 2011 increased to $66,467 (see Table 3). This modest salary increase did not keep pace with the rebounding economy, which saw the US CPI increase by 3.6% (see Table 3).6 In contrast, Canadian salaries (reported in Canadian dollars) surpassed inflation by 1.3 percentage points: the Canadian CPI increased 2.7%, while median salaries in Canadian university libraries increased by 4.0% to $85,551(Canadian dollars, see Table 4).7 The difference in the exchange rates between 2010–2011 (1.0556 Canadian per U.S. dollar) and 2011–2012 (1.0014 Canadian per US dollar) contributed to these changes. The median beginning salary (BPS) for university ARL librarians increased to $46,000 in 2011–2012 (see Table 2). Table 6 shows that nonuniversity librarians also experienced increases in their median and beginning salaries in 2011–2012, which increased to $95,046 and $51,630, respectively. 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 Shaneka Morris Association of Research Libraries 6 CPI data retrieved from the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index-All Urban Consumers (US All items, 1982-84=100 -CUUR0000SA0) available online at http://www.bls.gov/data/. 7 The source for Canadian CPI data is Table 5: The Consumer Price Index for Canada (All-Items, Not Seasonally Adjusted, Historical Data) published in The Daily, a Statistics Canada publication, available online at http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/62-001-x/2009010/t040-eng.htm.