A decade of job realignment movement at large Chinese and American academic libraries from 1998 to 2007

Based on a questionnaire survey,the paper made a comparative study on the changes of traditional library positions within the context of the emerging professional positions and functional units at some large academic libraries in China and in the United States from 1998 to 2007.It describes how some of the library professional positions and functional units have gone through a time period of intensified and proactive position allocation realignment in terms of their rise,decline,fission and/or fusion within the administrative context of their library's evolving changes in missions,objectives and service delivery structure under the impact of the rapid development of information technologies.Such changes are graphically demonstrated in several charts in this paper to highlight the evolutionary development of academic librarianship in general and the waves of changes for library position reallocations in specific in the ten-year period under study.It is believed that such a study can be useful for discerning the overall developing trend of academic librarianship,especially in the area of the rising professional and social status of academic librarianship during this period.The movement of library position allocation realignment was a corresponding response at the time to the influx of applicable information technologies to the library scene.It not only made the library operation to become'leaner and meaner,' but also gave added impetus to the rise of the professional and social status of their practitioners in the society due to the latter's enhanced service delivery innovations and capabilities for meeting their constituencies' timely information needs more satisfactorily.