We Don’t Count: The Invisibility of Teaching Librarians in Statistics on Academic Instructional Labor

Abstract

[Excerpt] The field of library and information science (LIS) has seen a tremendous growth of interest and activity in postsecondary library instruction since the American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy released its Final Report in 1989. In subsequent decades, academic libraries and librarians moved beyond traditional bibliographic instruction (BI) to embrace the pursuit of information literacy (IL), despite a historical skepticism of librarians’ place within a teaching domain traditionally reserved by disciplinary faculty in the postsecondary setting. Libraries’ centering of the IL mission has been accompanied by librarians’ turn to library instruction as one vehicle for pursuing it. However, a collective oversight in measuring our teaching workforce has distinguished academic librarianship’s uneasy and precarious cohabitation of a domain increasingly beset by labor strife.