From the 1960s until the 1990s, gender equity was a topic of great interest in library workforce studies. In the almost forty years since affirmative action law was made applicable to institutions of higher education, efforts have been made to increase the number of women administrators in academic libraries, and it is now assumed that women have achieved parity. However, there is little hard evidence available about their representation in all types and levels of academic libraries. A follow-up study was done to two earlier studies of the status of women in academic libraries. Using the American Library Directory as a source, the gender of individuals holding the positions of director, associate or assistant director, or department head in ARL and Liberal Arts I libraries in 1972Arts I libraries in , 1982Arts I libraries in , 1994Arts I libraries in , and 2004 were studied. Although women have not yet achieved parity at all levels, the percentage of women administrators has increased significantly over the years. There is still a substantial gap at the director's level in the Liberal Arts I and a smaller one at ARL libraries, however, the results show that since the 1970s, women have succeeded in almost erasing the gender gap in academic library administration.

As a result of rapid environmental changes, organisations of all types are rethinking their organisational structures in an attempt to provide greater effectiveness and efficiency. A few years ago business process re‐engineering (BPR) was considered the most promising way to restructure an organisation, but has become less popular as shortcomings associated with the process have become evident. Today, greater emphasis is being placed upon modifying the actual organisational structure. Most restructured organisations have moved away from rigid hierarchies to flatter, more flexible structures. Many of the same forces (including increased automation, changing information needs and expectations of users, reduced budgets and the need for staff to have more autonomy over their own work) that have precipitated the reshaping of other organisations have also affected academic libraries. This paper describes some of the factors leading to changes in the organisational structures of academic libraries and provides an overview of trends, excluding convergence, discernible in North America. The paper includes suggestions for steps to be taken to facilitate successful reorganisations, and comments on possible future developments that might radically alter the organisational structures of academic libraries.

The Carolina Academic Library Associates program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) is a cooperative program of the University Library and the School of Information and Library Science. The program is designed to be a tool for recruitment and a way to better prepare master's degree students who choose to work in academic libraries. The program offers a model that could be adopted by other academic libraries interested in recruiting high quality graduates to academic librarianship.

Over the last decade the library and information science (LIS) field has experienced an increasing concern with workforce issues, including the aging of the workforce, the lack of minority presence in the field, and the need for succession planning. Little systematic research has been done to characterize the exact nature of the problems and to develop data collection models that can be used to track the workforce on an ongoing basis. The Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science 1 (WILIS 1) project is a three-year research project designed to study the career patterns of graduates of library and information science (LIS) programs in North Carolina. The purpose of this paper is to describe the study design and methodology of the career retrospective study fielded by the WILIS study and to discuss the methodological lessons learned from this experience. The WILIS 1 career retrospective survey was fielded as a Web-based survey with complex skip patterns and achieved a 35 percent response rate. Topics for which lessons were learned include: the identification of effective strategies for updating graduate contact records, the relative efficacy of paper versus e-mail contacts in the survey recruitment process, the contributions of a nonresponse study to issues of generalizability, issues related to survey length, and the use of incentives.

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