Number Employed in Libraries in the United States as of August 2018

A Fourth Update to ALA Library Fact Sheet 2

See the Third Update, Second Update and the First Update.

The presenters and recipients of the 2008 I Love My Librarian! awards. From left to right: Annalisa Crews, Janet L. Robinson, Linda Allen, Gigi Lincoln, Anezoo Moseni, Iona Malanchuk, Jean Amaral, Amy Cheney, Elaine McIlroy, Carol Levers, Paul McIntosh, Jennifer Lankford Dempsey, Jim Rettig and Vartan Gregorian. 2008 I Love My Librarian! Awards By David Shankbone (David Shankbone) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

There are an estimated 362,945 employed in libraries of all kinds in the United States today.

This number of 362,945 is a drop from the 369,003 calculated in the Third Update, which comes from a drop in the number of public school library workers. Also of note is the lack of updated numbers for academic library workers.

======================================

The library workforce includes librarians and other professionals, paraprofessionals, clerical and technical personnel. Statistics are not available for each category of personnel in each type of library. Instead this fact sheet summarizes the latest available statistics on the two major categories — librarians and other professionals, and other paid staff — in the three types of libraries for which reliable national figures are available from National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Library Statistics Program, the National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

• In a press release dated April 23, 2018, IMLS Releases Annual Data and Survey Results of American Public Libraries, IMLS…