An Uphill Battle: Academic Librarians and the Barriers to Scholarship

Some academic librarians within Pennsylvania and across the United States have been granted faculty status by their institutions. With this status comes the expectation that librarians will contribute scholarship to their discipline. However, with many librarians holding only a master’s degree, there is the likelihood that they lack the requisite skills to engage in research. On top of this, multiple studies have shown that librarians feel they lack the time to pursue scholarship on top of their typical job duties. This commentary discusses how these barriers create stress for librarians, hurts their scholarly pursuits, and how the current culture in academia may play a role in it.