Academic librarians, particularly college librarians, may increase their contributions to the professional literature through collaborative authorship. For example, university librarians, who published 69 percent of the articles in College & Research Libraries and the Journal of Academic Librarianship between 1986 and 1996, contributed almost 90 percent of the coauthored research in those core journals. This study examines the increase in collaboration in the literature of academic librarianship and in other disciplines, explores the relationship between collaboration and article quality as well as author productivity, compares collaborative patterns of college and university librarians, and considers factors that lead to successful collaboration.

College librarians recognize research and publication as important components of professional growth and communication. Yet, compared to their counterparts in universities, they author fewer articles in the professional literature. This paper examines articles published by college librarians in College & Research Libraries and Journal of Academic Librarianship from 1986 to 1996 to provide a profile of college librarian authors and to identify factors that contributed to their success in publishing.

Although women have made significant progress in traditionally male-dominated occupations such as law, medicine, business, and science, those who have children are unlikely to advance to the top positions in their fields. This study examines academic librarianship, a “feminized profession” in which women represent close to 70 percent of the work force, to determine if women in the highest-level job, the directorship, have been able to both succeed in their careers and become mothers.

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