V-19a: Public Library Staff Holding the Title of “Librarian,” per 100,000 People and as a Percentage of All Public Library Staff, Fiscal Years 1995–2022*
* Based on the total unduplicated population of libraries’ legal service areas. Values are for the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Calculations were performed on all libraries treated as public libraries by these jurisdictions, not only those meeting all Federal-State Cooperative System criteria for public libraries (see “About the Data” for details).
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Public Libraries Survey (1995-2005); and Institute of Museum and Library Services, Public Libraries Survey (2006-2022). Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).
Under the Federal-State Cooperative System, a public library is an entity established under state enabling laws or regulations to serve a community, district, or region, is supported in whole or in part with public funds, and provides at least the following:
An organized collection of printed or other library materials or a combination thereof;
Paid staff;
An established schedule in which services of the staff are available to the public; and
The facilities necessary to support such a collection, staff, and schedule.
A library, in this instance, refers to the administrative entity, which could be a single-outlet library or a multibranch library system. In fiscal year 2022, the most recent year for which information was available at the time of publication, 9,029 libraries operating in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia met these criteria. These entities provided services via 16,194 central and branch libraries and 659 bookmobiles (M. Pelczar, J. Li, S. Alhassani, and S. Mabile, Public Libraries Survey: Fiscal Year 2022, IMLS-2022-PLS-01 [Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2024], https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/pls_fy2022_csv.zip).
