Building a Strong Foundation: Mentoring Programs for Novice Tenure-Track Librarians in Academic Libraries

Abstract

Increasingly, new librarians graduate to face a world of changing technology and new ways of interacting with information. The anxiety of this shifting environment is compounded for tenure-track librarians who must also meet scholarship and instruction requirements that may be unfamiliar to them. One way that librarians can navigate the transition to tenure-track professional positions is to participate in mentoring programs for new academic librarians. This study examines the effectiveness of mentoring programs for novice tenure-track libraries in a variety of library settings, and provides examples of successful academic library mentoring programs already in place with the intent that librarians use the data and findings to construct or improve their own library mentoring programs.