 Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's Webcast. At this time, all lines have been placed on the listen-only mode, and the floor will be over for your questions in the comments following the presentation. If you'd like to ask a question during the Webcast, you may do so by clicking on the Ask the Question button located below the presentation. Simply type your question into that box and hit Submit. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn it over to Martha Kiddilidoo. Ma'am, the floor is all yours. Thank you, Patrick. I am Martha Kiddilidoo, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Analyzing Age and Race Ethnicity Demographics. This is an in-depth look into some of the insights we can gain by analyzing data we collect through the ARL Annual Salary Survey. This Webcast is the last of four Webcasts we held during this year, featuring work related to the data collected through this Annual Salary Survey publication. First of all, thank you for joining us, and I have a couple of logistical things for you. Everyone will be muted to cut down on background noise. We do welcome questions, though. Please type your questions, and we stand ready to answer all of them. Questions and answers that we do address as well as those we don't will be distributed to attendees after the Webcast, along with a recording that will be available on the ARL YouTube channel. It has been my privilege to work for a number of years with all the ARL libraries and the people who submit the Salary Survey, and it is my privilege to be here today with you with two of my dear colleagues, Mark Puente and Stanley Wilder. Mark Puente is the Director of Diversity and Leadership Programs here at the Association of Research Libraries, and Stanley Wilder is a university librarian at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. And I've been working with Stanley and the demographic data on the Salary Survey for many, many years. So we have put this Webcast together with the following goals in mind. How are demographic trends in our organizations comparing with the general U.S. trends? What are our retirement trends? How are these trends affecting the racial and ethnic composition of the profession? And what are the job categories with the highest growth and how are the new entrants coming into the profession? Through what job categories? Now, for these goals, the following agenda is addressing them. Mark will look at some enrollment data in colleges and universities and how these compare to the ARL data on race and ethnicity. And the work ARL is doing on diversity and leadership programs that he's managing. And then Stanley will discuss with us issues related to professionalization and retirements, changes in the workforce, and implications for the profession and our organizations. Now, before we move forward, we have a poll question. And our poll question, going to pose the question, says, has your library had any staff members involved with ARL's leadership and diversity programs? And you have a minute or so to answer your question and this is going to be an introduction to the next session that Mark will lead. Let me, we do have some responses go back. Coming in, here are the results. We have 57% of you that said, yes, people have gone through these programs. So, Mark, this is an audience that you know very well. Right, exactly, fairly engaged. Well, thank you. Thank you, Martha. Thanks for the opportunity to speak to the audience today. As Martha indicated, I direct diversity and leadership programs for the Association of Research Libraries. They have been around for quite a while, a few decades, starting in the early 90s. I think that it's always helpful, if we'll go to the next slide, always helpful for us to frame these sorts of discussions, any discussion about race and ethnicity, with just a quick hand on the pulse, if you will, to check where we are and where we're headed, perhaps, with respect to representation in this context, of course, within the United States. We know from, of course, new sources, from the political pundits, and of course from other experts, of course that the landscape of the U.S. is changing very quickly and very dramatically This pie chart, of course, represents data from the U.S. Census Bureau in the last census in 2010, and it shows a majority population of 67.5%, along with or within the five major ethnic racial categories and understanding, of course, that there are many, many ethnicities represented within each of those pies. But even that in itself, of course, we know is a bit problematic, given the growing number of people in the United States and in Canada, I would say, who are identifying as mixed or multiracial or biracial. So this graph, of course, represents, it shows projections for what this makeup might look like by the middle of the century. Of course, given the fairly dramatic changes in minority representation that happened in the U.S. from 2000 to 2010, it's fair to say that many experts believe that we're going to meet that threshold, that is, the day when the U.S. is a minority-majority population much sooner than by that 2050. Okay, for the next slide. We will drill down just a little bit more deeply to analyze data from our immediate constituencies. We see in this pie chart the data were derived from the National Center for Education Statistics, and it provides a snapshot of the demographic landscape from 2009 in terms of higher education enrollment in the U.S. Of course, always with some caveats and exceptions, particularly with respect to the racial and ethnic categories, this pie chart closely resembles the 2010 Census Bureau statistics with enrollment of, again, those majority cultures, the Caucasian representation at about 62%, if you remember, the 2010 Census indicated 67.5% Caucasian representation. So in the next slide, I think we will see, again, some projections for this going forward. This is, let's see, should we go ahead even further or are we perhaps missing that slide, Martha? The NCS, Higher Education Enrollment. Okay, so what NCS is actually projecting is that the changes into the next, I don't know, six or seven years, perhaps through 2020, will be even more dramatic than what's represented here in 2009. Again, with the caveats and the qualifications that, for example, minority populations are more likely than their majority culture counterparts to be enrolled in, for example, two-year institutions. I think it's also very interesting to look at current birth rates in the U.S. For example, there was an analysis of the 2010 U.S. Census done by the Brookings Institution, and they estimated that in 2012, there were approximately 14 states with minority-majority populations within their toddler populations. That is, the children ages five and younger. So I think the possible implications for the class of 2030 are pretty great. I think it's also interesting to note that some of those were in states such as Maryland, Delaware, and Mississippi, and not just the border states, as one might predict. So let's see what we have in the next slide. So what does all of this look like within the context of the admittedly small samples that is the makeup of AOL member institutions? Again, qualifying that these data reflect U.S. university libraries, and in this instance, law and medical libraries as well. We are currently at about 14.5% minority representation within professional staff. It is perhaps not really fair to look at peer associations or the profession writ large, since the salary survey data are updated very regularly and are more recent than some other groups, but nevertheless, in case you were wondering, that representation is a bit higher than what ALA reported in its update to its diversity count reports just last year. In that report, they estimated that public academic and school library minority representation was at about 12%. And of course, ARL member organizations are a bit more diverse than other organizations, such as ACRL, the Society of American Archivists, the Medical Library Association, and other associations, recognizing, of course, that the methodologies for data collection for those groups are quite different than what we use here at ARL. And again, those data are not quite as recent. But if we analyze this data just a little bit deeper, we do see somewhat larger divides in representation, especially in respect to managerial or leadership positions within ARL libraries. The 2012 and 2013 ARL Salary Survey, which the previous pie was representing, will show that 5.4% of ARL directors are from underrepresented groups, traditionally underrepresented groups, and that's out of a sample of 112. Although recent placements within our membership I think will result in higher percentages in 2013. Also, I think it's interesting to note that among assistant directors and associate directors, representation is at 7.8% and 9.5%, respectively. So those percentages are a bit lower. So this graph, I think, is very interesting. And it's also directly related to what Stanley will be addressing a little bit later in our hour here together. Although our efforts to diversify the professional workforce in ARL libraries has resulted in only incremental gains over the last five to 10 years, we seem to be positioned for greater gains, I think, in the future. Yes, our representation is a little bit higher than the profession writ large, but then also somewhat like the population statistics for the U.S., professional librarians from traditionally underrepresented groups are a bit younger to the profession than their counterparts from majority populations. And these bars here have several ranges, representing several ranges of years of experience within the profession. And you see here that most minority professionals in ARL university libraries reported having somewhere between either four to seven years of professional experience and eight to 11 years of experience. So those are the two largest groups. And I think it'll be interesting to see Stanley slide a little bit later when we talk about demographic, age demographic and retirement trends a little bit later. Some may be wondering and thinking about, although we don't have graphs represented here, there is, of course, a small gap in pay between men and women, no surprise, and a larger gap in average pay between all women and, of course, just minority women. There's a gap of about $4,200 when you analyze those data. Of course, there also may be other variables that play here than just race or ethnicity given what we see in front of us with respect to the experience factor. And yes, within ARL libraries, women comprise 63% of the professional workforce and men just above 37%. So yes, it remains somewhat dominated, our profession by the female gender. So if we go to the next slide, why is it important at all to track these data, to compare these data against national trends and to have a sense about what this all looks like? And this is, I think, a healthy model. There's certainly a lot of science and a lot of research around the value that diversity brings to organizations. This particular model, the Attraction Selection Attrition Model is one that we use quite frequently here at ARL. And it speaks to organizations and how people, it sort of operates on the presumption that people are differentially attracted to their careers as a function of their own interests and their personalities. So basically, people make the place. They create the organization of culture. They create climate. And they create the practices. All of those are determined by the people of the organization. And it is those people that really inform how others, outsiders coming into those communities are socialized. Excuse me. So if we look at this model, organizations select people into their organizations who they think are compatible for a variety of different functions within the organization. People invite other people to be part of their organization who share common attributes and not necessarily just competencies. And we know that well from librarianship. The attrition bubble that's represented there is, of course, the opposite side of attraction. When people don't fit into an environment, they tend to leave it. This leaves a more homogeneous group than even what was originally attracted to the organization. So there's certainly a great deal of science. Again, as I mentioned, that provide evidence that in fact more homogeneous organizations are in fact less effective at problem solving and less agile in the face of change, which we all know for libraries is the norm rather than the exception. So this model helps to, I think, help us think about that attrition and attraction related to how we recruit naturally and, of course, how we retain our workforce and the effect that has on creating a diverse organization. So that is really where we stand. I did want to just briefly go over on the next slide the range of programs that we manage here at ARL, our diversity and leadership programs. So there are many programs in our portfolio related specifically to diversity. For Institute of Museum and Library Services, funded diversity recruitment programs initiative to recruit a diverse workforce, the career enhancement program, the ARL Music Library Association Diversity Inclusion Initiative, and our most recent effort, a collaborative program with the Society of American Archivists, the Mosaic program, and the other two bullet points are related to our leadership development programs. Our longest standing being the LCDP, the Leadership and Career Development Program started in 1997, and the ARL Leadership Development Program. And this slide just also provides some additional information about what sits under the diversity and leadership portfolio, including our career resources website, a leadership symposium that is held every January, and the National Diversity and Libraries Conference, and our next offering will be, we hope, in 2016. So just a brief run-through of our products and our programs and how they relate to our membership. We do feel that there is some impact, some effect on our membership in a positive way with respect to representation, but we also recognize that being an inclusive organization goes much beyond mere representation and including an environment where diverse people can thrive and really succeed. So that sums up my comments. Thank you, Mark. Now we do have a poll that relates to the Attraction, Selection, and Attrition model you presented, and I did pose a question to the audience. It says, describe your Attraction, Selection, Attrition pipeline in the last three years. And it gives them some options, two, four options to select. The first says, more people have been hired than left retired. The second option, more have left or retired than hired. The third option is hired and left or retired balanced each other. So the same number, more or less, has come in and out. And the fourth option, not much hiring is happening or not much living and retiring is happening. And let's see what the results look like. We see that overall the group with the largest segment, 56%, is the one where number three, where the number that have come in and the number that have gone out balances each other. The second largest group with 37% more have left and only 6% have hired more people. This is interesting. We do have another poll later on that relates that to some of the economic trends that before I go there I wanted to also mention that what Mark presented as the Attraction, Selection and Nutrition model is also something we use in the climate call line of research, which is an organizational tool we have to measure climate and diversity. And here is the next poll question that relates to the economy. Do you have the sense that staff are delaying retirement due to the economy? This is Stanley gave us this poll question and you can vote. As the votes come in let me see how many we have. Most people have voted. I'm going to show you the results and the results indicate that yes, 70% said that more people are delaying retirement, 29% said no, that that's not happening. So clearly we have some trends that are affected by the economy. So as we move forward into our next speaker, I wanted to emphasize that what we are going to focus on and what Stanley has worked with is data that we collect through the A&L annual salary survey but they are our quinquennial data. These are the data we collect every five years. There are certain data elements we collect every five years but the most probably important of those data elements is the year of birth which is what Stanley has used to calculate and study the age demographics. Some of the other variables you see here, additional job codes library degree and other degree are also collected on a quinquennial basis and we also have a variable called years in the library of that five-year cycle and using these years in the library in relation to years of experience allows us to define the entrance to the profession. And Stanley has started working on this many, many years ago. Here is some of the earlier report that he did. There were two monographs ARL published with his data the first one back in 1995 entitled the age demographics of academic librarianship at the time when we were realizing in our profession is shifting rapidly in 2003 I think we were more cognizant of that shift and his monograph demographic change in academic librarianship highlighted the latest status of that shift and more recently in 2000 he did a bimonthly report and he is now working on analyzing the more recent data. So Stanley are you there? I am here. Thank you for having me. Great. Well right here in 2013 research libraries are smack in the midst of the biggest transition in staffing that we will ever see. Some of this transition is strictly demographic as the result of a population of library professionals that's been disproportionately old and aging quickly since at least 1986. As we'll see in a moment large numbers of us are now reaching retirement age where there is nothing else going on we would have to say that we are experiencing now a full scale of the guard. But we are also seeing enormous changes in the demand for skills in research libraries starting with lower skill tasks that are simply disappearing or if you like being replaced with tasks that require much higher skills or skills that have never been part of a traditional view of a research library portfolio. As we'll see demand for the new skills is actually crowding out demand for traditional library functions and reference. This shift in demand is visible everywhere we look in the data which I'll remind you relates only to library professionals but these changes are absolutely part of a larger trend affecting all library staff including student assistants and support staff. Let's start with the demographic changes. The narrative here is simple. The 1960s and 70s produced explosive growth in higher education that growth extended to research libraries to such a degree that even in 2010 the typical professional aged 60 and over began her career in 1975 or earlier. In subsequent years research library staffing grew much slower heightening the importance of the population that we added in the 60s and 70s. This is one reason why I argue that the state of our population is not just another story of the dominance of the baby boom generation. So let's have a look at the ARL age data beginning with 1986. This is our and we'll Mark if you can go to the TV6 there you go. This is our youngest population with almost 40% of us under age 40 and as you'll see this group dominates the population from that point forward. We have then 1990 and we can go forward to 1990. Martha there you go. Oh 90 and 94 you can continue 1998 and forward to 2000. We'll just go straight through 2005 and then finishing up with the most recent data which as Martha said is the 2010 data. We're now almost 40% of us are aged 55 and over. I hope that it's obvious how unsettling this series of curves is if folks were entering and exiting the population in a consistent fashion the curve would remain perfectly stable. Instead since 1986 our population as a whole has been both older than comparable professionals and aging at a rate that approximates the rate at which individuals age we do not wish to see our profession do what individuals do at the ends of their careers. Actually we're going to talk a little bit later about whether the instability in the age of our population might actually have a healthy side but at very least as of 2010 the population of research library professionals is at a crossroads. Here's what I mean when I say that our changing of the guard happens right now. We really can't access data to isolate retirements in a formal way but we can look at what happens to the number of people say in the 60 to 64 age cohort from one data collection to the next. In any given data set we lose about half of those people in the 60 to 64 cohort by the next data set and that gives us a loss of about 340 people between 86 and 90. Now that figure increases really until it jumps up between 2005 and 2010 to about 800. That was then but consider what's happening right now in 2010 over 15% of the overall population fall in that 60 to 64 age cohort over 20% of us are 60 and over. I don't think it's possible for the population to get any older than that not short of a massive change in retirement behavior a thing that just shows no sign of occurring. In some we are right now in the peak period of retirements for our population. Next I want to talk about job areas that are unusually old. Now when I ask this kind of question I'm thinking about staffing strategy and short term succession planning but savvy young people might ask the same question by way of choosing specialization areas that we are at risk of losing some types of expertise or finding it much more difficult to recruit appropriate staff. Let's start with two big traditional skill areas. And here we find that 16% of reference and 25% of catalogers were age 60 and over in 2010. I've included the functional specialists in this chart to give a sense that near term retirements will hit traditional library skill positions far more than non-traditional ones. And then we're going to hold that thought for later. But I feel I need to say something about our catalogers at this juncture. As a percent of the population in 2010 there were just half as many catalogers as there were in 1986 and their share of new hires has dropped even lower. But to say that in 2010 there were one in four catalogers were age 60 and over, friends we've got to have a talk here. Do research libraries have a going forward need for advanced bibliographic or descriptive expertise? I think everyone would agree that we need fewer than we did 20 years ago. But how do we propose to maintain any of this expertise in light of the extraordinarily high levels of retirement that are upon us right now? After cataloging, the next succession planning problem we have relates to management. I say problem and maybe you would say opportunity you can decide for yourself. In the overall population only 5% of us in 2010 were 65 and older. That share among department heads though is roughly double and 30 to 40% of this group were age 60 and over. So this changing of the guard I've been talking about will apply to leadership even more than to the rank and file. Either way we really do need rather urgently the mentoring programs the leadership institutes the systematic succession planning to make sure that we develop or are able to hire folks who are ready to step up and run things. Speaking of running things I can't leave the subject of old managers without mentioning the special case of library directors. Directors age 65 and older were just 3% and that's exactly the same as the population as a whole. But 10 years later that figure is a whopping 23% and 66% were age 60 and over. Nothing else comes close. This is the single biggest I knew I was going to have trouble with this succession planning challenge facing research libraries. Before I leave the subject of age a word about what we can expect of our age curve going forward. You have to ask this question if only because there's really not as much guesswork about this as you might think given that we're talking about a variable that comes close to being perfectly predictable. So we can make pretty good guesses to what happens next and know it doesn't involve the profession collapsing and dying. We produced age projections based on the 2000 data to tell us what will happen out to 2020 and so far those projections have proven to be excellent. So here you have then the projected age from starting in 2010 2015 and then 2020. You can advance to 2020 when you get a chance then Martha. First on the old end of this curve at long last the steep decline in the older age cohorts that just had to happen in 2015 and it's steep enough to get us already by 2020 back to a population that's nearly as young as we were in 1986. The changing of the guard then begins in 2010, trails off through 2015 and is finished by 2020. But focusing on the retirees could lead us to miss the importance of the youth movement that's about to occur. Let me cycle back to the actual data in 2005 and 2010 curves. Alright, so if you could go to the next one I could say I didn't have a cue there. The increase in the 2005 and then 2010 up to the next one. There we go. The increase in the youngest age cohorts here is just barely perceptible. I really expected it to be bigger but it was a serious recession year and as we'll see this really did suppress hiring. From 2010 forward, however, it would take an economic catastrophe to prevent a serious youth movement. There are just so many senior librarians about to retire. So the projections have our numbers aged 40 and under rising to 33% in 2015 and in 2020. Speaking of young people we did a little study on the millennials in our population. These are people born in 1980 or later. I really just wanted to get a sense of who these people are. Now, first of all, I have to say there are very few of them, only about 250 and mostly I found that they're just like the rest of us in terms of gender, race, education background and so on. But they have some interesting differences too. They're mostly mobile, even compared to young people in previous years. Almost half of them fill functional specialist positions and that's a very high rate but of those functional specialist positions fully 22% of them are archivists of all things. I don't know what to make of that, do you? I think we're probably going to have to keep an eye on this group which figures to become in any case the next dominant age cohort in research librarianship. Meet your replacements. Well, we will. Oh, helpful. We'll be archivists if not catalogers but we do have a poll question here and I'm going to pose the question to the audience and you have it on your screen and it reads, what is behind the sharp increase in the number of young people hired for archivist positions? And you have three choices to make from. The first one says growing importance of unique collections of your print. The second, archivists are replacing catalogers and the third, archivist skill sets match the multi-format needs of modern collections. And we can stop the question about the results here. I'm going to show you the results so you can also see them. We have all interesting distribution now 43% said the third choice. Archivist skill sets match the multi-format needs of modern collections but it is actually split between the first and the third choice of growing importance of unique collections of your print and only 12% thought that the archivist and the catalogers are replacing each other. So back to our to Stanley. Okay, great. I want to switch gears now and talk about the other half of the sea change in research library staffing and that's those relating to changes in our skills. And I'm going to start talking about demand for library professionals as reflected in the overall demand for new hires and new professionals. So here you'll see a graph of new hires as a percent of the ARL population. 2010 was in fact a down year though not the lowest in our data series. By this measure 2010 was a bad year but maybe not quite the worst. I suspect that it was the worst because this 2000 figure doesn't account for the far higher level of retirements that surely occurred that year. A similar situation affects new professionals. The 2010 numbers are actually the lowest in our data series but here again I think the same logic ought to apply that the proper benchmark for 2010 should take account of all of those additional vacancies. Which leaves us with the not astonishing conclusion that 2010 was in fact a very bad year for hiring among ARL libraries. But the real news here is who is and isn't getting hired. Let's have a look at what jobs these new hires were filling in 2010. And let's look at the top three new hire job groups from 1990 to 2010. Okay, wait a minute what looks right here? First of all, what is it with this FS line here? In 2010 a whopping 36% of new hires categorized as functional specialists. And you see that that FS curve goes back to at least 1990 and shows no sign of slowing down. There's really no telling how high this curve could go. The phrase functional specialist refers to a hodgepodge of skill areas that includes human resource professionals, preservation specialists, archivists, but functional specialists also include folks who work in IT in one form or another, their web builders, programmers, that sort of thing. And that accounts for about half of the category. I've been writing about the rise of functional specialists but what about the rest of the curve? How about the sudden and precipitous decline in the demand for traditional and I would say library school based skills? As I said, the decline in cataloging hiring isn't new. It began years ago running at least 10 years ahead of reference. But I think it's important that while the cataloger new hire line is that the cataloger new hire line is dropping slowly now, it's trending down. But until the new data set, we couldn't have predicted the decline in demand for reference librarians. Reference is the principal point of entry for our profession and as a function it has not been subject to the same kind of inexorable pressure stemming from increased automation and network efficiencies that have reduced our need for catalogers. It is quite true that nationally we've seen a significant decline in construction function is much bigger than transaction counts and I'd have thought that this work would prove to be relatively robust. Having been so surprised with these dramatic changes in the composition of new hires, my next question is to ask whether all these new hires have altered the mix of skills in the overall population. And the answer is absolutely profoundly so. For the first time in the available data, functional specialists constitute the biggest job category in our libraries. Further, if you remember the advanced age of catalogers and reference librarians, the new hire trends suggest that functional specialists will continue to grow and at the expense of traditional library school expertise areas. Reference once again is the shocking part. This job type has been rock solid steady through the data back to 1986 and here in 2010 it falls to its lowest level ever. And we do have another poll question for our audience, Stanley and I'm going to pose the question right here. It asks them whether the following sentence is true or false. Libraries expend more salary for fewer support staff than they did 10 years ago. And you get to vote true or false on that question and I'm going to stop the question now and show you the results. And what you see is that 90% said true to this question. Let's go back to Stanley and let's see what he has to tell us about this transition. Okay. Well, so far I've talked about the broad age-related transition that we're now experiencing and the huge change in demand for professional expertise that's bringing new skills often at the expense of traditional library skill sets. But I think that there's a problem if we leave it there a kind of forest for the trees sort of thing. The forest that we risk missing is that these professional trends are part of broader trends that are affecting all library staffing in dramatic ways. Back in June of this year I published a short article in Library Journal called The End of Lower Skill Employment in Libraries. A sunnier way of saying the same thing is that the library workforce, and I mean all staffing at research libraries, is on a sharp upward trajectory in terms of the skills required as simple routine tasks disappear replaced by fewer jobs, higher paid jobs with much higher skills requirements across the board. Here's the case that I make. First, as does student assistance we can cycle through to the next one. Student assistant jobs are disappearing altogether. Between 2000 and 2012 the ARL median student FTE declined 25%. There's a natural limit to how much training a student can get, and I believe that student jobs in libraries will continue to dwindle to a very marginal place in our workforce. Next, the employment of support staff plunged as well, median FTE going down 20%. That's huge, but just as significant the expenditures for support staff actually increased 25%. So it's certain that libraries now pay more money for fewer people in that category and from this I infer a shift to higher skill tasks and higher and higher skill higher pay staff. But you can really see the shift to higher skills among professionals whereas the other job categories lose FTE professionals are up 10.5% in that period and expenditures up a whopping 7.5%. I believe that if library professionals cost a lot more than they did 10 years ago it's because libraries are competing for non-traditional skills for which there is a strong value on the open market. I think of these broad changes as professionalization. I know some folks will hear that and object that librarians have always been professionals and of course they have. On the other hand, I feel we need a way of characterizing the steady escalation of skill requirements all over our libraries. A great example is reference work which I'd argue is orders of magnitude more demanding than it was 20 years ago and we need a way of expressing the much broader constellation of skills represented in professional positions generally and finally we've got to have a way of referring to the new support staff positions. Jim Neil has said that support staff are doing the work that librarians did 10 years ago and while I can't prove this except to point to that higher salaries for fewer workers thing that I mentioned just a moment ago I really suspect he's spot on in this. But wouldn't it be great to have data tracking changes in our support staff? So let me tie up the elements that I've presented here into a single narrative. Research libraries are voting with their feet as regards filling positions, de-emphasizing traditional skill areas like reference and increasing hiring of a whole suite of non-traditional skills dominated by computing. The urgent imperative to hire such people is a matter of basic relevance for 21st century research libraries. With these new demands and in the absence of huge increases in budgets we are so fortunate that there are important spheres of library work that no longer need to be done. By the same token we are also fortunate that at this moment of urgent need for non-traditional skills we just happen to be at the very peak of a generational changing of the guard. So please don't misunderstand me. I do not regard the retirement of our most senior librarians as a good thing. Those people are essential parts of our workforce and their departure causes many serious problems that require our immediate attention. That said, the departure of such experienced staff is only one of our staffing challenges and the challenges don't stop there. We've also got to manage all of the transitions that tag along with it, like credentialing, culture, mission, compensation and finance. But I expect that if you're even watching this webcast, you like me will find these challenges stimulating, even beautiful. We're inventing together the 21st century research library right now. Let's get to work. Thank you. Thank you for the good message there. So one question that is coming from our audience, the trends in our profession reflect the high demand for computer expertise that exists even outside our profession. How do you think libraries can be competitive in this race? I think that libraries share the very same challenge that our universities do in terms of how to match the salaries of the private sector. In fact, we can just simply say that we can't match those salaries and as a result we're going to do the thing that we're doing now which is being exceptionally creative in terms of finding the things that we can sell to folks who have the right kinds of expertise and that might be quality of life issues. It might be the option of offering educational benefits. I think to some degree it has to do with the kind of work we do because I really have found that the important segment of our IT staff absolutely understand and love the challenges that we're working through. The kinds of problems that we're facing are really satisfying to some people. This helps us recruit and retain people as well. I'll grant you that this is a serious problem and it doesn't have there's no substitute for getting everywhere else. Thank you, Stanley. Mark, are you with us? Do you want to take a stab at this question? Well, I was just going to perhaps piggyback a little bit. Going back to that Attraction Selection Nutrition Model and to figure out a way, my suggestion would be to figure out a way to tap into people with those sorts of competencies that again are attracted to the type of organizations that libraries create by their functions on campuses and that sort of thing. I think there is an opportunity. I think we share a similar challenge for example with respect to recruiting people with STEM domain expertise and yet I think that there has been ARL member institutions have been able to take advantage of the sort of you know, should I say maybe some flooding a little bit of people with that sort of domain expertise into the marketplace so I think there are some opportunities you just have to be strategic about that Attraction part of it in terms of the recruitment aspect of it. I would like to thank both of you for the wonderful information to this webcast. We do have another question. I thought there was another one coming. Anything else, any of you would like to add before we move into our conclusion part of our webcast? I actually would like to respond to the poll that had to do with folks delaying their retirement because I like all of the poll respondents felt sure that people really were delaying their retirement. What we found from the data though is that there is absolutely no evidence of this. There is a slight increase of folks who are 65 and older let's say in 2010 over previous years but the problem with that is that that was part of the projections dating back to 1995 and it's really a function of well it's kind of a demographic function as opposed to having anything to do with the economy. I just sort of would like to note that in this case I think our sort of anecdotal sense may not be borne out by the data. Thank you Stanley. Now it brings actually the issue of looking forward to whether our assumptions are informed or uninformed projections will be confirmed by the next round of data collection. We will put together in 2015 so something to look forward. In the meantime we have made some changes into the ARL annual salary survey to reflect better the new environment and as a result of some of these changes some of the longitudinal comparisons will not be happening anymore because we have changed some of the job titles. We have maintained though enough continuity too one of the things we did in revising the job titles is to introduce a notion of various specialist positions. We have kept the three broad specialist categories functional subject specialist administrative specialist. And as a result of introducing we had functional and subject specialist before but by introducing the administrative specialist category now we are in a position with the most recent data on the job codes to say that functional specialist is not the most popular category anymore subject specialist is the most category this last year and we are defining for this coming year the subject specialist to some breakdowns that try to track that category as it relates to the social sciences and the humanities so we'll have a better sense of specialization within subject specialist. Now to some extent these are challenges and opportunities that are creating less hierarchical organizations as we have more technical expertise and a flatter structure and finally and Mark brought the issue of competitive salaries that is something we need to keep addressing now what are some of the implications is the need to make a stronger case for delivering value and I did click on this slide I don't see there but maybe Patrick can help if he gets back somewhere in the ether the case of making a case for delivering value is happening in many of these organizations by introducing positions like the library assessment area assessment librarians and we are actually capturing this job category with the revised job category schema the technical expertise introduces some of these shifting specialties because some relate to budget some may be relating to development of additional technological roles and ultimately there is a challenge when we are working on making the case for higher salaries in a traditional female profession that in the hierarchy of salary distribution hasn't fared very high I do want to bring to everybody's attention that there is collaborating evidence for many of the issues we highlighted in this webcast at the LJ placement and salaries the library journal placement and salaries article library journal publishes a piece on placement and salaries every year so I hope you'll take a look at that and I want to remind everybody that we do have on the ARL YouTube channel the webcast from these series the series entitled effectively using the ARL salary and demographic data and I hope many of you will have a chance to look at the whole series and on behalf of Mark and Stanley and myself I want to thank you for attending today's webcast thank you have a great day thank you for this thank you for your participation now disconnect your lines and have a great day