Teaching Faculty Perceptions of Academic Librarians at Memphis State University

In recent years academic librarians have shown increasing concern over how their teaching faculty colleagues perceive their role in the university community. Four surveys conducted on university and college campuses since the 1980s have identified attitudes held by teaching faculty. A survey conducted at Memphis State University (MSU) in the spring and fall of1990 repeated earlier survey questions and added original questions evaluating the MS U Libraries' adequacy, librarians' service, and the library collection. The Memphis State survey supplements previous findings highlighting similarities and differences in teaching faculty's perceptions and suggesting strategies to promote better understanding of academic librarians' roles. any recent studies focus on the public's perception of librarians. Academic librarians show increasing concern over how they are perceived by their faculty colleagues. Several constant factors affect the relationship between librarians and teaching faculty. They include the number of academic librarians, the strength or weakness of the collection, and the size of the institution, the faculty, the student body, and the library facility. Currently, diminishing financial resources strain this relationship even further. As early as 1%8, florence Holbrook cited Robert Leigh's observation that much of the librarian's unfavorable image can be ascribed to the fact that the nonpro-fessional library worker is more visible, and subsequently, patrons cannot determine ne who is a librarian and who is not. Faculty cannot easily distinguish between librarians and support staff. Robert Black-burn noted that teaching faculty and librarians clash because of the roles they play, competing ends, and characterdiffer-ences.2 In 1969 Maurice Marchant traced conflict between teaching faculty and librarians to anything that diminished faculty's control over students. 3 In 1981 Mary Biggs cited several sources of conflict between teaching faculty and