IMLS Study – Opinion Papers on Library Workforce Issues

As part of the multi-year IMLS study of the future of the library workforce, librarians were invited to serve on “expert panels” to develop opinion papers that would present the challenges for the workforce to be faced within the many library communities. 

The individuals to serve on the “expert panels” were identified by members of the study's National Advisory Board.  The Panel members were asked to draw on their knowledge and experience in addressing the workforce issues that had been identified by the Advisory Board.  The Panels were asked to provide a “view from the field” in presenting the workforce issues with a focus on the next ten years.

The Panels were not asked to develop scholarly or research papers nor were they asked to identify solutions to the workforce challenges.

These papers are intended to provide a basis for further discussion in the profession regarding workforce issues. 

The Panel members worked over a period of three to five months through conference calls, email and fax.  They were geographically dispersed across the U.S. and, in many cases, were working together for the first time. 

The Opinion Papers are now available, in the hopes that they will be dispersed through professional associations and generate continuing discussion of relevant workforce issues.

The Opinion Papers have been collected into a single Adobe Acrobat, or PDF, file, that may be downloaded. Please note that the file is 2.1 MB in size, so it may take from 2-5 minutes to download it, depending on the speed of your Internet connection. The papers are also available individually. The PDF versions of the IMLS Advisory Panel Opinion Papers were created using Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.05. If you are using an earlier version of the Acrobat Reader, but in particular versions earlier than 5.0, you may experience problems reading and/or printing these documents. The easiest way to address this problem, should you encounter it, is to download the latest version of the Acrobat Reader at Adobe's Website.