A typology of librarian status developed for land grant universities is extended to US research universities. Land grant librarians are tenure-track faculty in 70% of institutions. Librarians in the expanded population have that status slightly more than half the time. Institution size, geographic region, and public/private governance are…

Data were gathered on librarian status at fifty land grant universities. The findings reveal four status types: Professorial, Other ranks with tenure, Other ranks without tenure, and Academic or Professional Staff. Eighty percent of institutions have librarians who are faculty and 85 percent of those are tenure-track.

The relationship of the academic library with the campus computing center has been an issue since at least the late 1970s. The issue was discussed at length in the 1980s with little effect on existing organizations. Interest in the issue was rekindled in the 1990s, when a number of institutions merged or aligned the library and the computer…