Salary Survey Trends 2011–2012 · 7 Salary Survey Trends 2011–2012 The ARL Annual Salary Survey 2011–2012 reports salary data for all professional staff working in Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member 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 Assessment 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 US and Canadian academic and research libraries and is a valuable management and research tool. Data for 9,910 professional staff members were reported this year for the 115 ARL university libraries, including their law and medical libraries (930 staff members reported by 72 medical libraries and 742 staff members reported by 77 law libraries). For the 11 nonuniversity ARL members, data were reported for 4,046 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 11 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 US and Canadian data but excluding law and medical data. The fourth section, composed of Tables 26 through 30, reports data on US 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 US 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 US and Canadian institutions are combined, Canadian salaries are converted into US dollar equivalents at the rate of 1.0014 Canadian dollars per US 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 2010–June 2011 and is used in converting figures that are shown effective as of 1 July 2011. This information can be accessed at: http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/ exchange.html.