Building Our Own Bridge: Paving the Way to New Promotion and Tenure Guidelines

Our academic health sciences library worked to construct a P&T document that fairly represented all areas of our library: education/research, collections, systems/technology, and special collections. This presentation highlights the process our library took to construct this new document and how these guidelines will be used for P&T and annual reviews. Background: When it came to the Promotion & Tenure (P&T) process, our health sciences library had a short supplementary criteria document that provided some guidance on the P&T process and examples of the three areas of teaching, research, and service. Past candidates applying for promotion and tenure relied on the University’s general P&T documentation. Faculty librarians faced challenges describing their work within the general university guidelines. With feedback from faculty who have recently gone through the P&T process, library administration tasked a committee to redraft the library’s P&T guidelines. Description: To help us understand how health science library faculty are evaluated, the Promotion & Tenure (P&T) committee gathered and reviewed peer institutions’ promotion and tenure guidelines. In addition, we reviewed other college guidelines within our institution and the current library P&T criteria document. The goal of this review was to create our own in-depth guidelines that, in the future, library faculty must utilize through all stages of their P&T journey. Some of the reviewed promotion and tenure documents grouped promotion criteria into the categories of librarianship, research, and service, but our team felt that limiting librarianship to a single aspect of our promotion criteria would miss or de-emphasize the importance of some aspects of our work as librarians. Program Conclusion: The new document focuses on 1) education, 2) research and creative activities, and 3) service and administration. To make sure that the P&T document fairly represented all areas of our library (education/research, collections, systems/technology, and special collections), we encouraged faculty to interact with the document to ask questions and offer additional suggestions. After three rounds of faculty review between November 2024 and January 2025, the document received a vote of approval in February 2025 and was submitted to University Academic Affairs and the Board of Regents. The proposed P&T guidelines were used as a blueprint for a faculty workload document that had been requested by Academic Affairs and will, after their approval, inform faculty members’ annual reviews.