 At this time, it is my pleasure to turn it over to your host, Martha Curie-Lidu. Ma'am, the floor is yours. Thank you. I'm Martha Curie-Lidu, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the second ARL salary webcast. We have four webcast plans this year featuring the work that's related to the ARL annual salary survey. And the first one is already on YouTube, and this one will also be available on YouTube. First, thank you to all of you for joining us. As you've heard, everyone will be muted to cut down on background noise. We welcome questions. Please type your questions, and we stand ready to answer them. Questions and answers that we do not address, as well as the ones we address, will be distributed to attendees after the webcast along with the recording. So today, here with us, we have three guests of ARL research libraries. We have Carla Stoffel, Dean of Libraries at the University of Arizona, Provost and University Librarian at Case Western Reserve University, and Jeffrey Treziak, University Librarian at Washington University in St. Louis. All of them have used the ARL subways that go beyond the publication. And the goals we want to cover in today's webcast is exactly to discuss how to use the ARL annual salary survey data beyond what is published in the PDF we make available through the web and in print. We want to showcase how libraries have used the salary survey custom report services. Libraries can tell and specify the parameters of different data extractions they want from the salary survey data, and we'll showcase how these three libraries have proceeded in doing that. And we want to, you can demonstrate issues with the salary structure at your institution that need to be addressed and think through some of the strategies leaders and directors and teams of libraries use to make the case for improved salaries. So to accomplish these goals, we are going to move through the agenda in how we can move beyond the publication, see where it's going to be, how we can use the new information we collected for the first time last year on job titles and enhance the job code categories we use. The long-term strategy that the University of Arizona has implemented in using salary survey custom reports. We will look at in-depth exploration of these data that Arnold Hirshen did at Case Western University. And we look at the strategy from a new director's perspective as Jeffrey Treziak assumes the directorship at Washington University in St. Louis. And we hope to have time for questions, the Q&A box to fill in your questions. We will also have a few poll questions. You will see my colleague Amy Yeager will be pushing the poll questions. Amy, do you want to read this one? Have you used the ARL salary survey to make the case for higher salaries at your institution? The answer is yes, no, or no, but we plan to use it. You can use the publication. And what can you find in the publication? You can look at breakdowns for different job categories for men and women, for different minority groups. You can also look at the breakdowns for the different job categories using the job codes, the standardized job codes we use. Clearly they are, you know, a little bit general, but they do offer a perspective. We have breakdowns with years of experience with geographic regions. We have breakdowns of salaries by different types of libraries, the privates, the public, the Canadians, and of course by libraries grouped in different size based on their number of library staff they have into four different groupings. We have collected job titles and a lot of that had to do with the revision of the job codes we used and validating whether the new job codes reflect new and emerging job titles adequately. But we have also found out that it's useful to use the job titles as we try to develop custom report services for salaries. Case Western actually had the opportunity to use some of that job title information. Arnold, will you briefly share with us how was that useful to you? Sure. I'll talk a little bit later about what we did in more in-depth, in this particular case we had an associate director position come open and before we advertised the position I was asked even by the provost office what the salary comp would be for the position because we needed to be able to budget effectively for it. And so I checked with Martha and I said if I gave you the following essentially key words because every title is going to be slightly different from library to library can you give me salary comparable information? And she gave me very useful information. It actually helped to show that we were currently under budgeting what we would likely need to budget to be able to fill the position. Thank you. And this was the case with a couple of other ARL libraries this year so I'm really happy to already report that some of the new ways of collecting data is having some direct payoff. So before we move on to Carla Stoffel who will describe the University of Arizona use of the salary data you will have another poll question for you and Amy will read that to you. The second question asks whether your library has used salary comparative data to make a case and choose once every year? Yes, every year. Yes, once in a while. Or no, not really. Use once in a while. Now the salary server publication report on an annual basis and this started before I think it's been happening for a number of years now and she'll tell us. Thank you, Martha. Two over 20 years ago when I came to the University of Arizona and I was negotiating my package to be dean here I noticed that the salaries for librarians were very low then provost if we could develop a plan for over three years to bring the salaries to... He suggested to me, I was coming from Michigan so I was using Michigan salaries he suggested to me that he had no evidence at all that our salaries were low that he had no idea that nobody showed him that anybody ever left because their salary was too low or that anybody ever turned us down because what we offered was too low. And at this point in time the provost actually was bringing back to centrally all the money for positions and then you had to justify a new position and it were faculty and assistant associate or foe and then he used kind of as his benchmark kind of what people were already making so it was basically the poor getting poor so I made to prove to him that we needed to do something different and that I could come up with something that was national in scope national by meaning our university peers across the country that it would be regular and annual and that it would have legitimacy like the assistant associate or foe faculty members in universities turned to ARL to see if something could be done with the salary survey to customize and compare our salaries by rank with peer libraries we had 15 peer institutions identified by the Board of Regents and ARL staff looked at a number of possibilities and came up with 14 tables that compared Arizona's low, high, average and median salaries to our 15 peers and you'll see on the screen the categories that we used for salaries to actually set our salaries we started out first using years of experience and then the average salary by rank for setting most of our salaries the rest of these though did give us useful data for example average salary by number of years of experience for example 10 to 14 years in rank order sort of told us where in general our people were outside of assistant associate and foe and helped us benchmark the same with race and ethnicity so we could do a number of comparisons that gives you some of the data that we could actually compare ourselves to as I said the first time within each of our ranks people were really compressed everybody started at beginning and it wasn't much differentiation by years of experience so we used years of experience to recruit new people knowing that we were creating compression but we were also creating a market and then within the existing people we used years of experience to make the university that we needed to do something with our longer term personnel and years of experience one of the problems that we have is that year one and year two the average salary may be high but year three it may actually be lower than year one and two and so we had to manipulate the years of experience and we did it in five year categories so we would take five year range and the low salary and the high salary and then average it out and then have a number consistent number so when we averaged it out it might be that there'd be a thousand dollar difference each year of experience after a time period when we sort of dealt with the first problem of major compression we realized that within our what we were trying to do at the University of Arizona would reward people by learning and that years of experience didn't necessarily mean that somebody was more performing at a higher rate or more valuable to our program so we had a new compensation program and we moved then to peer average by salary our first peer average is we have a system associated in full and this worked for but we found our peers and so this last year we've actually had to move to the four step system for comparison because we only had one peer that was still using the three steps so that became another issue for us we take administrators out of figure the average salaries and for comparison purposes we also take it out of our peer salaries and we all opt for promotion instead of for example the associate rank and being willing to stay at peer average now as I said people in our HR we couldn't stick to just the in some cases it was because people were not ranked in some of those jobs in others it became impossible to recruit librarians with IT background at assisted librarian salaries we had to move to a different salary scale and that's when we used the functional but also that a few years that people especially from the east coast and major urban centers often make more than an assistant librarian salary where they would be ranked because they haven't been in a faculty ranking system assisted salaries have been low and there really hasn't been much that we've in fact done to tackle that yet so people have actually had to accept lower salary we've had to create administrative salaries because our categories don't match ARL so our team leaders are more than department heads but they're less than assistant directors so I have had to create for team leaders that sort of averages assistant director and the average for department heads and create a new level for ourselves but our benefits have been that our salaries are really competitive now except in a few specialist instances our assistant librarians all make at least 56,000 our associate librarians make 70 our full librarians make at least 85,000 another benefit is for us the peer salaries generally go up each year and the increments are actually fairly consistent over the years and the campus accepts our benchmarks and we have actually the first ten years we're actually able to get campus money to bring our salaries up and recently we've still asked ten years we've been able to use these benchmarks to add actually market money to our salaries and these have all been approved because we had this data so we also continually check the data on the other dimensions to be sure that we haven't created a problem that we were not aware of some of our issues are that market issues are sometimes caused by using just ranks and I mentioned those IT people from other areas that we create compression with this system and we deliberately do it so that in years when there's no raise money some folks get discouraged because the peer average is going up and they're not going up and so they get a little cranky with the system and without constantly sort of explaining this system individuals who come to work with us don't necessarily understand what we're doing and why in the system and so we have to continually remember that we need to explain what we're doing with this system also promotions when you promote from assistant to associate for example this year we'll have several people who will get raises of $14,000 or $15,000 in their promotion that's good for them but it's sometimes difficult for the library to come up with the money but we do do this consistently with promotions once in a while the averages drop especially the last few years the averages have dropped in the full librarian ranks and we believe it's probably because this is where people are mostly retiring some associate librarians who are looking and seeing that three years ago if they promoted they would have gotten a much larger raise than if they promote now or next year and that doesn't encourage some of the things that we would like to encourage but it's worked pretty well up to now for our salaries for librarians at Arizona Thank you Carla there is a question from Hi, Lynn Theodore, she said at Ohio University she's asking whether you considered using media rather than average figures why using average? I think we chose the average salary at the time the average salary was higher than media and my so that's why I chose average I can speak in or whatever time you're in I'm going to explain that our approach was this was the first time a market equity study had been done in the library probably in quite some time and our salary equity review was really an integral part of our strategic planning process it was not an independent exercise it came toward the end of the strategic planning process after we had done the strategic plan after we had redesigned our organization so that we knew what all the positions would be in the new organization we had all the job descriptions in that new organization and so this set the context for now that we know what the jobs are how do we appropriately pay people for the jobs that they're about to be doing or in some cases by the time the salary review is completed the jobs they were actually already doing so if we can skip a couple of slides please so when we did the market equity study we did it looking at four different categories of staff we had exempt staff who were in the library broadband family which I'll explain in a moment we had exempt staff who were outside of the library broadband non-exempt staff both in a library broadband for non-exempt and a non-exempt university classification so the library job family was all positions that were unique to the library so if you look at the exempt and the non-exempt it would have been exempt and non-exempt if we look at just the exempt it's librarians and non-librarians but positions for which there's no comparable position elsewhere in the university and the university terminology here for this was broadband which is really an HR classification system but the easiest way of thinking about it for most academic librarians is our librarian broadband was equivalent to academic status and it was a four tier and it is a four tier system as Carla was explaining as our librarian 1, 2, 3, and 4 one of the things that we did when we made this switch originally when we were talking to HR, the university HR about making these changes they wanted to move everybody to apply for every job and we did not want to do that and so we created generic job descriptions and the four classifications have these generic job descriptions for anybody who's in the broadband and the four categories will be familiar to probably anybody who's in an academic or faculty status situation things that relate to job performance professional contributions service publications and presentations and so forth professional knowledge abilities and skills and professional qualities and people have to be able to show competence in all four of those areas the other thing that we stressed to the exempt staff that were in the library broadband is that as you move up the ladder from a librarian 1 to a librarian 2 to a 3 and a 4 the expectations for what it takes to move to the next level stay at the next level and go on to the level beyond that the expectations continue to increase that was also something that was probably a little bit new for people to get their heads around but it also affected how we did salary study and how we approached the process I mentioned that we replaced the individual job specific position descriptions with one generic library position description so there's one description for librarian 1 another description for librarian 2 and so forth and then there may be supplemented with a small number of either specialist or officer descriptions and we had separate descriptions that were required for team leaders or for associate directors our team leaders or what others might have at the department head level equivalent but basically all of these fold into one big generic job description so even a team leader for example may have that team leader job description but that job description's supplement does not replace job description so we also had another layer of this is for certain categories of staff we had for example for our research services librarians what we call a balanced portfolio all of them have areas of responsibility related to collection management to instruction to research support and relationship management with faculty and students and these are the four minimum sets of responsibilities and some people might have higher concentration during the course of the year they may be doing more instruction but less collection management or more collection management but less research support the point is they should balance this across the year and they should be talking with their team leader about that all of this folds then into the salary equity process because we were having to then figure out how are we going to have comparables in a situation like this now again I'm only talking about one of the four groups that we looked at which is the library librarian and library job family broadband so we asked AARL to compile salary data for four cohorts one was for case western defined institutional peers and those are the institutions as defined by the university not defined by the library we asked AARL to also collect information for six other private universities around the country we asked them to combine those two data sets into a single data set and then we asked for a fourth one of just the four other AARLs that are in Ohio just in case that issue were to come up within the university which I'll explain later why it didn't but we had all that data if we needed that data now when AARL sends you the data and this is an opportunity that Martha and I have been talking about is it comes in very raw form and so the first thing that we needed to do was take a whole lot of data dumping that came in four different spreadsheet tabs with hundreds of rows on each one and collapse it so that it was readable now this gives you the number of data elements that we had and it was low high average and median were the numbers that we received in all cases except for a few in some cases if there are not enough institutions in a cohort AARL requires that there have to be a minimum of at least four people or positions that are comparable so if there were fewer than four we would only get average and median but we wouldn't necessarily get low and high this is the first part of the data elements this is the second part of the data elements we got all of this data from AARL and if you started doing the statistical combinations of this you can obviously see that they number in the millions so how do we take that data and make it usable and manageable so if you think back a few slides ago of the raw data we took that raw data and what you see on the next slide that's the next slide please what you'll see in this slide is just one of the many tables so this gives you our peers that's the institutional peers middle management in rank order sorted by average and it gives the average and the median and going back to the question that Carla was answering before let me just make a generalization we looked before we decided to use one versus the other we looked at average and median across the board of the various categories we chose to use and frankly there was little to no statistically significant difference between them in our peer cohorts and you kind of get a sense of that as you look through this one right now so if you use the average it was 76,000 if you use 197 use the median it was 75, 897 it was almost random which one we picked we looked at a number of possible approaches for organizing and selecting our data and we found that there was just so much data and there were a number of things that we tried that didn't work tried to use a multivariate analysis and inclusion of too many variables complexity and did absolutely nothing for increasing the value of the data that was being generated so we started eliminating variables we looked at trying to set the salary by specific functions or by specific positions by and large we found that the data did not support it and some of it was almost random if we have a combined acquisitions cataloging operation and ARL separates acquisitions and cataloging data does it really do as much good to use two separate sets of data so it also became just too complicated to do it by that method we tried adjusting we looked at adjusting salary for cost of living for our geographic location and we purposely chose not to this was almost something that we were predicting human resources would ask us for it and our argument was we did not want to adjust for cost of living for four reasons one our recruitment is national not regional as Carla explained the comparisons must factor in actual residents of employees in a suburban area we're in a city we have lots of suburban areas and I pulled up cost of living data for two towns that were right next to each other and got wildly different cost of living data I said I'm going to go through this and pick the town for every single employee so that didn't work most peers had higher salaries but lower cost of living than we did so the data didn't really provide as much there and we also were concerned that the ARL index score which is in part based upon simply how much you'd spend if we used a lower salary as a basis based on cost of living we were simply going to lower our ARL index score and we didn't want to do that and finally we looked at calculating years of experience year by year and we went to the same clustering that Carla talked about because you cannot use when you've got data that goes from year one to year 40 year by year there are just too many statistical anomalies there and so we clustered in five year increments which were the same as Carla and we did that without knowing that Carla had done that years ago and so it worked for both of us so some things that did work one we created a normalized peer cohort we did not take any one set of ARL data or one statistical derivation we took instead and then you'll see it when I get to a little bit further down in the next slide you'll see that we created a new salary table that interpolated data and said in some cases it might have been median in some cases it might have been high low but we did it on an interpolation basis we created a new base salary table then within each of the four broadband categories we ranked base salary by years of experience clusters which I'll get to in a moment and then for individuals with managerial administrative assignments those team leaders we added a stipend so this is what it looked like go to the next slide the salary table if you look to the left those were what we see of the minimum the medians and the maximums that's what we used to calculate our new base salaries and the plus signs that you see on the right side that's how much we had to add to our current salary chart to make the difference so you can see for example at librarian 2 the maximum had to go up by $12,000 and librarian 4 only had to go up by $4,000 then we adjusted by years of experience and if we go to the next slide it'll be a little bit easier to explain that we basically said we're expecting that at certain levels you already had a certain number of years of experience so there was no sense in making an adjustment for a librarian 4 with only 3 years of library experience because we wouldn't have a librarian 4 with that few years of experience we also wanted to max it out because at some point having 20 years 25 years 35 years 40 years at the same rank is not necessarily giving us qualitatively anything higher and so you can see in the orange where everything goes in but it's not a formal step system the reason I say it's not a formal step system is we use this to calculate a one-time adjustment to rebalance the salaries but this is not something that we would keep adding year after year after year it was once we got somebody to the right salary level it would that would be the level that the person would keep tracking with thereafter we go to the next slide our team's leader's stipends are not calculated into the individual's base salary so if we had a librarian 3 and the librarian 3 were being paid $60,000 on top of that we would add this stipend this was something new for us we had not done this before we do compute it as an increase to compensation in other words that stipend amount is calculated on salary plus fringe benefits but it is not in the base salary we used a standardized dollar amount for all affected team leaders we did not do it on the basis of the individual's base salary so every team leader just gets a standard stipend and this only affects team leaders there's a different stipend system for associate directors and it's paid annually on a fund permitting basis and we started the current fiscal year and we reserve the right to adjust the stipend amounts annually upward or downward now would we likely decrease it no we wouldn't but we did not want to set an expectation that we might not have been able to meet and so we just want to make sure that people understood that from the beginning Arnold is there a stipend sort of a bonus in some ways or what's the difference no it's not a bonus first of all it's it's paid it's divided up we pay monthly so it's it's cut up into 12 payments during the year which a bonus typically be paid once and it is not performance based it is for responsibility basis thank you so just to finish up quickly some other findings for individuals who we found who were currently above market and who therefore were over compensated we did not make any salary reductions that was a university HR requirement we found that most of our most significant salary discrepancies were for the team leaders primarily because of the stipends but also in part because of their base salaries we found that by and large the lower two ranks of librarian one or two required greater salary information than the higher two ranks and that we made no base salary increases except unless somebody was not at the new minimum we made no base salary changes in fiscal 2013 and we said that if we do make them they'll occur no earlier than this coming July and that would be done only if funding permits and if funding permitted us to make only some adjustments but not others we would have priorities and announce what the implementation schedule would be for that to all staff so then the question comes okay so is there money to close these gaps those stipends that I mentioned we funded from existing library funds we are not going to where private university we have significant endowments but we are not funding any salary changes we have endowment because salary endowment income can fluctuate significantly over the course of a few years even though we are on a rolling average it can fluctuate so we did not want to do this unless we had predictable income we have always told the staff that the purpose of the salary equity study was to establish the extent to the problem that we would have sufficient funds to rectify it immediately but it would be a priority to try and rectify it over a few years thus far we had to fund all of the changes from the existing library budget by making the stipend changes we probably closed the total gap by about 30% I am hopeful that we can close about another 10 to 20% of the original gap in fiscal 2014 and we are still requesting additional funds from the university to try and close the remaining gaps but that is all going to depend upon the budget and it is probably too early to say whether or not that is going to be possible so thank you we do have a question Brian Keith from the University of Florida is asking whether it is the same stipend for each team leader yes it is it is the same stipend amount it is a fixed amount he has a second part in his question are all of the team leaders admin responsibilities the same I would say by and large yes in terms of complexity of responsibility they may have somewhat different numbers of staff that they are supervising or the level of staff that they are supervising but by and large our belief about what the expectations are and so we might have one team leader who may be supervising more people but the more people that the person may be supervising may be at non-exempt level where somebody who is supervising fewer people may have more exempt staff so on the whole yes we thought that this was a fair balance so that we were not getting into why is one getting paid more or less of a stipend than the other this is very helpful thank you very much and just to remind that Brian Keith actually is going to be the speaker in the third webcast the next webcast in the series and he is going to talk also about the market equity approach at the University of Florida but in the meantime and before thank you Arnold we are going to move into our next speaker but we do have a poll in the meantime Amy the third question reads are salary increases or adjustments are basically happening through flat percent increases flat dollar amount increases merit increases variable adjustment methods or no increases in recent history we'll wait a couple minutes for some responses to come in and we want to get a little bit of the pulse of the audience on how what's their experience is in their organization these days okay I'll stop the question now in previewing the results with just seven answers so far we have 28% set of flat percent increases and no one had flat dollar amount 42% merit increases 28% variable adjustment methods and 0% had no increases in recent history that 0% 0% is encouraging thank you Amy and Jeffrey Treziak from the Washington University in St. Louis Jeffrey? Thank you Martha my presentation is probably going to be fairly brief since I am new to the role of University Librarian at Washington University in St. Louis and we're still really in the early stages of working with the data that we've received from NRL and working with our institution to address some of the issues that we have with salaries just for a bit of information about the University and how this data pertains to it for the purposes of this presentation I'm focusing on the library locations that report to me as the University Librarian so that does not include our Law Library, our Medical Library or Social Work Library the University in fact has not conducted any kind of internal review of all the libraries during this process that the discussions have all been around the librarians who are part of the University Library organization and the request that I put forward for increases pertained only again to the University Librarians that are part of our organization When I started in July of 2012 there were a significant number of vacancies at a number of levels including there were about nine and included two Associate University Librarians or soon two Associate University Librarians but there were many that were in high priority areas e-resource management library services digital archivist etc and I quickly discovered that the individuals were leaving the organization because they were finding comparable positions at other institutions where they were being drawn away by higher salaries and we obtained this information from them largely through exit interviews so we had some data when I started to show that WashU was not being competitive with the salaries that we were offering our professionals unfortunately the challenge that we have had is that relative to our peers WashU is underfunded and that affects not only our ability to recruit and retain staff at all levels but it really affects all of the operations so at the same time that we had this issue with the salary we also had very little leeway in terms of salary and kind of increases. Our salaries here at WashU from Arnold who had already started this process and called to alert me to the fact that WashU was quite low in terms of salaries at all levels that we were offering low but until I had an opportunity to talk to Arnold and really do an initial review of the ARL staff I didn't realize at that point how low we really were relative to our peers and while examining this data initially in the process of conducting some searches to fill the existing vacancies we had three of our most qualified candidates turning not able to adjust the salaries in order to meet the needs of the candidates we had to adjust salaries at all levels in order for data from WashU and our peers so that included institution to make the request for the adjustments we really focused on the lower levels which I'll explain in a minute our budget year is July through June and unfortunately while we were working with the University on the salary issue in preparing our budget for next year the University asked all units to submit a possible 5% budget reduction in February our budget requests were going in we submitted in addition to the possible 5% budget cuts we also requested an additional $150,000 to enhance Librarian Salaries having already received the initial data from ARL and we were able to provide this data to the University along with the request that went in with our budget submission the request was then forwarded to our central HR for review they used the ARL data that we requested but they also conducted their own market analysis using data from Towers Watson and also from the College University Personnel Association so they accepted the data from ARL but also wanted to get some additional Watson and CUFA we then worked with HR to identify how we would distribute the funding at this point HR factored in that we were going to get an across the board 2.5% increase anyway but the total add-on request was actually increased as a result to $158,000 at this point we chose to limit it to the Librarians that were at the lowest we identified 3 ways of distributing the funding which would be based on qualifications skills performance and comp ratio in priority order then we identified skills would be first this included things like language proficiency and technical skills second would be qualifications largely identifying dual degrees advanced degrees like a PhD performance which had always been part of the annual process so we didn't want to exclude it from this in their comp ratio in terms of their years of service and salary increases continued with the request once it was reviewed by our central HR it was then forwarded to the provost office for approval so at this point HR was just saying the data is accurate we understand send it off to the provost office for approval and the provost office approved the it was then forwarded on to the personnel review committee who also approved the process that we went through until really June whether or not we're going to get approval for this or a 5% reduction I'm not entirely confident an acknowledgement of a problem but the suggestion that we deal with the problem internally reallocating funds is necessary not necessarily receiving additional funds for a positive outcome but I'm not entirely sure what will result it's clearly you know this there's blessings in having all these data and information but at the same time sometimes you cannot take action right away and all mentioned but if you would elaborate a little bit Jeffrey on the aspect of communication and what are some key elements in that communication is a generative process that has many steps in terms of communicating with the university administration yes that would be one aspect communication also with some of the candidates as you said that went for other jobs a number of different communication aspects is there some specific elements you would like to highlight as to what has worked positively what has worked positively in some of these the exit interview with departing librarians identifying the fact that we were getting people to other institutions who were paying more in the interview process we were offering positions to who were declining based on salary and we were able to identify then with them anything you would like to highlight on the communication aspect well you know you really need to not only communicate with the administration and then central HR so that they understand what we're doing but it's imperative that you continue to be sure that the library faculty understand what you're doing and what your parameters are you know we went five years basically without raises which really plays havoc then with any kind of compensation system and we've suffered I think of problems and assumed that people understood that the university just wasn't giving us any money and I think that we should have talked more specifically about what was happening and what our plans would eventually be also we went four or five years where we didn't sell fund raises and in the past we had self-funded to keep the system I think stepping away from that even though it would have again deeper budget cuts was probably a problem so it's you need to communicate with a lot of people and have them continually understand why the salaries are the way they are and that it's not haphazard and the strategy may there are certain elements of a strategy one more question for all the speakers and Arnold feel free when your turn comes to mention anything related to communication but this is a very interesting Kim Bearhope at Duke University she would like to hear the speaker's thoughts on basic salary on years of experience versus skill sets or performance we tried to do was achieve a compromise on that point recognizing that to a certain extent the more experience that somebody has it compliments and increases their skill set but I have for many many years said there's a difference between having ten years of experience and one year of experience ten times and that's really when you get down to the salary issues what it comes down to and it raises the whole problem of when you do a study like this what you're trying to do is implement the system that can work for tens or hundreds of people and it may flatten out some of the individual um contributions and the individual benefits that somebody brings to the job but what you're doing is basically trying to recognize a certain amount of experience recognize a certain amount of years that it takes to get that experience but not necessarily try and do that exclusively. This is Carla we've experienced initially to try to get some distance among our folks within the ranks we don't use it at all the issue is one that Arnold raises is very hard to tell by years of experience whether it's ten different years or one year ten times and so we move to a philosophy that says if we bring people in at midpoint which is the average then we will try to keep them at midpoint assuming that they are performing they should be compensated at that point and that beyond that merit should be the determiner and part of that merit is gaining new skills and making broader contributions to the organization Jeffrey would you like to comment on this last point if not we can we're going to remind everybody that we have our next webcast on safety study using the ARL salary data to establish and maintain an equitable salary structure for faculty librarians and as I mentioned before it's going to focus on some of the techniques in Florida which is actually the place where they are also developing the position data bank and the ARL path that will join us for that webcast well I would on November 5 we have another webcast on analyzing demographics with Mark many of you there I would like to thank our speakers today's speakers and Jeffrey Treziak thank you very much all of you for being with us