Number Employed in Libraries in the United States as of April 2020

(Yes, I changed the title’s date from “December 2020” to “April 2020” to make it more consistent with the updates that came after it. It’s the “Episode IV — Luke & Leia were always siblings!” of my library statistics series.)

From Valerie Hawkins, FKA ALALibraryVal — see update with May 2020 and May 2021 Occupational Profiles numbers at Number Employed in Libraries in the United States as of April 2021 and April 2022. See the latest updates with May 2022 Occupational Profiles numbers at Number Employed in Libraries in the United States as of April 2023.

I last addressed this statistic in my post, Number Employed in Libraries in the United States as of August 2018, calculating 362,945 using the surveys from the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. I hadn’t updated this statistic because, quite frankly, only one of the source reports that I use has been updated with new information — the public libraries report, with Fiscal Year 2017 data, which came out earlier this year. Some of the other numbers are veering on a decade old — or older. And it doesn’t look like they are going to be updated any time soon. I am especially disappointed by the lack of a new academic librarians number, especially since the most current Digest of Education Statistics reports now show a combined “Librarians, curators, and archivists” number, which probably works to be unhelpful to academic libraries and museums and archives — a triple play!