Academic librarian : Employers and vacancy sources

Typical employers include higher education institutions, further education colleges and research institutes attached to academic institutions. The size and arrangement of institutions vary considerably, but an institution's learning resource centre will consist of both information and computing facilities and will provide support to academic departments.

Some institutions may have many qualified librarians working on different sites and in different branches. This may involve travel between sites and possibly the use of different classification schemes and procedures. Branch librarians often enjoy a close rapport with their academic departments and staff. Central procedures, such as resource ordering, cataloguing and an inter-library loans facility, may be housed in a central location.

In smaller institutions with fewer staff, there may only be one information or resource centre, and academic librarians may find themselves undertaking a mixture of qualified and non-qualified tasks. However, they are likely to be closely involved in management decisions in view of the small size of the team and are, therefore, in a good position to get an overview of the entire operation.

Sources of vacancies

• Search graduate jobs on this site.
• CILIP Graduate Training Opportunities
• Lisjobnet  - jobs for librarians and information professionals.
• Guardian Jobs
• Jobs.ac.uk  - jobs in higher education.
• jobsgopublic  - jobs in public and not for profit sector.
• Times Higher Education (THE)
• National and local press.

A number of recruitment agencies handle professional vacancies. These include:

• The Association for Information Management (ASLIB)
• Infomatch, the CILIP Recruitment Agency
• Sue Hill Recruitment  - specialist employment agency for information sector.
• TFPL  - focuses on knowledge, information, library, records and web and content management.

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