Tenure Track librarianship - Are librarians crossing the floor?

A roundtable discussion at the ACRL conference revealed some of the burning issues that librarians still grapple with:

1. The difficult choice of remaining on the service side of the profession or leaping into scholarship (or doing both).
2. Unlike academics, practising scholar librarians are not given sufficient time to do research.
3. Librarians on the tenure system are paid ten months' salary for twelve months' worth of work.
4. Payscales are based on ranks in the Faculty
5. The criteria or requirements for tenure are often blurred and ambiguous.
6. Performance reviews include scrutiny by external reviewers.

One fact that has clearly come out of this discussion is that the system of tenure is not consistently applied in all University libraries that have elected to follow this path.

Is the goal of faculty status worth the struggle librarians go through? There was a resounding YES!!! to this question posed by the facilitator.Despite all other difficulties, librarians in the US think the Tenure system is a blessing.Many believe that they have to be given the opportunity to choose between staying in the traditional embedded librarianship role or cross over to the scholarly librarianship.