Fall is here. That means it is time to refresh our memories on tenure & promotion (T&P) procedures. Our faculty completed the annual tenure workshop earlier this month. I co-facilitated a session for our pre-tenure folks on the “directed service” portion of the Libraries’ requirements for T&P. We discussed the critical nature of an individual’s position description and unclassified performance plan (UPP), the need for regular review of the UPP with the supervisor to ensure that it updated as needed throughout the year, the importance of ongoing communication with the supervisor, and the evidence that should be included in the individual’s portfolio in response to areas needing improvement/attention. We encouraged folks to work closely with their supervisor, their assigned mentor, as well as with informal mentors.

Achieving tenure always seems like a daunting process as NASIG colleagues June Garner and Karen Davidson captured in their presentation at NASIG’s 2008 annual conference, Images of Academic Librarians: How Tenure Track Librarians Portray Themselves in the Promotion and/or Tenure Process. Their handout, available online for NASIG members & conference attendees, included examples of what individual librarians completed in the way of scholarship and non-directed service requirements in order to achieve tenure at their institutions. Many are quite rigorous. K-State Libraries’ criteria appear to fall in the middle of the pack, which I think is a good thing!

One thing I try to stress to individuals here: do your job and do it well. If you are lucky, your non-directed and research/creative foci will have their roots in your directed service. For me, those roots were in serials. And look what happened to me!