Library leadership: opinions and attributes about Nigerian women academic librarians breaking the glass ceiling

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the opinions and attributes about Nigerian women librarians breaking the glass ceiling that prevents them from reaching management positions in their respective libraries.Design/methodology/approachDescriptive survey research design was used for the study. Questionnaire was used as the instrument of data collection. The population of the study was 147 librarians at the university libraries of the six federal universities in South-west, Nigeria. Purposive and census sampling techniques were used for the study.FindingsIt was found that the opinions about women librarians occupying management positions in the libraries are negative. Women librarians do not have the required attributes and capability for management positions despite the fact that the extent of their preparedness for management positions is high. The study revealed that there is significant relationship between gender attributes and managerial capability.Originality/valueIt was recommended that there should be abandoning of organisational stereotype that characterises the opinions of librarians which make them think that women librarians are not fit for management positions. Women librarians should develop the attributes and capability that can qualify them for management positions in libraries.

“These Labourers in the Field of Public Work”: Librarians, Discrimination and the Meaning of Equal Pay

Librarianship has long been recognised as a numerically female-dominated occupation. Despite demonstrating a standard pattern of a sex-segregated labour force, it has suffered neglect in historical studies of women’s work. This article positions Australia’s librarians in the history of white-collar public service workers, and librarianship as illustrative of important themes of twentieth-century women’s labour history. For smart, educated, ambitious women, librarianship offered professional standing, economic security and opportunity for advancement. Strategies of overt discrimination, however, deliberately kept women librarians out of senior administrative positions and confined them to the lower-paying jobs. Librarians in state and municipal libraries worked under public service regulations that established a dual labour market of wages and conditions for clerical and professional workers. Key decisions between 1918 and 1922 explicitly advantaged men in recruitment, wages and promotion, denying women similar opportunities. Studying the history of women librarians sheds new light on the meaning of professional workers’ struggle for equal pay.

Propaganda, Censorship, and Book Drives: The Newark Public Library in World War I

This article examines the activities of the Newark Public Library during World War I as a means of highlighting the significant role American libraries played in promoting the nation’s war effort. During the war public libraries were usually the most important information centers in their communities. They distributed books, pamphlets, and posters in support of a wide range of government initiatives, they organized war-related exhibits and classes, and they collected vast amounts of reading material for libraries at military camps. Newark’s chief librarians, John Cotton Dana and Beatrice Winser, oversaw many such patriotic initiatives, but they also became involved in more controversial campaigns to employ women librarians at military camps and to resist wartime calls for censorship of unpatriotic literature.

«Together we were named Leningrad...» (Employees of the National Library of Russia in the years of Siege of Leningrad)

The period of Siege of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War is a tragic and heroic page in the history of State Public Library named after M. Saltykov-Shchedrin (nowadays the National Library of Russia). Overcoming all the severities of Siege, the Library staff never brought to a stop the reader service. The memory of the heroic women-librarians of the Siege years will remain forever in the memory of their followers.

Career Advancement and Writing about Women Librarians: A Literature Review

Objective – This review of the literature provides a framework for understanding the professional experiences of women library directors in academic libraries. It focuses upon career advancement and writing about women librarians in the United States and Canada from the 1930s to 2012. Methods – Databases from the disciplines of library science and business and management, including the larger social sciences, were searched for references to sources that dealt with career advancement and progression of women, specifically women librarians, from the 1930s to 2012. Similarly, these databases were also searched for sources pertaining to writing about women, especially women in libraries. Sources were also culled from major bibliographies on women in libraries. Articles and monographs were selected for inclusion in the review if they reported research findings related to these broad topics. In some cases sources from the professional literature were included if they offered a unique perspective on lived experience. Results – Evidence shows the number of women in senior leadership roles has increased over the years. From the 1930s to the 1950s it was the natural order for men to be heads of academic libraries, particularly major research libraries. Research studies of the decades from the 1960s to the 1980s provide evidence of a shift from the assumption that various personal and professional characteristics could be identified to account for differences in the number of men and of women recruited into senior positions in academic libraries. Despite this, women remained vastly under-represented in director positions in academic libraries. From the 1990s to the present, the evidence shows the number of women in senior leadership roles increased, despite factors such as mobility, career interruptions, or lack of advanced degrees that were traditionally identified as limitations to career growth. While women have gained in terms of the number of senior positions in academic libraries in the U.S. and Canada they are still not proportionately represented. The results section concludes with a review of sources that pertain to writing about women library leaders. This emphasizes that the professional lives of women librarians are largely unknown, as is the importance of their contribution to the development of libraries and librarianship. These sources were included to highlight the critical importance, but lack of material that speaks to writing about women and their professional lives and experiences. Conclusions – Research into the lives of women library leaders is important because women traditionally represent 75-80% of library professionals, yet the story of their career advancement and leadership within librarianship is bounded by characteristics – real or perceived – that affect their career progression. Future research focusing on collecting current data about career advancement of women in Canadian academic libraries as well as the contributions of women to development of libraries is suggested.