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ARL Position Description Bank Launches

job-description-file-folderWould you like to search job descriptions at your peer libraries from a single interface? Could you use a digital archive of job descriptions from your own institution? The new ARL Position Description (PD) Bank—launched today—could be just the tool for you.

About the ARL PD Bank

The ARL Position Description Bank aggregates position descriptions from participating academic and research libraries, making the PDs browsable and searchable. The ARL PD Bank provides a source for current PDs and also tracks the evolution of positions—and library functions and services—and the varied ways in which institutions organize and define functions.

The ARL PD Bank also provides participating institutions with a functional digital archive of their own position descriptions. In addition to standard data fields available to all participants, individual libraries may elect to use custom data fields that would not be viewable by other institutions, such as employee and supervisor names, classification, date last reviewed/modified, and other data identified by the institution as useful for internal purposes.

The ARL PD Bank has been developed by a team from the University of Florida Libraries and ARL, along with personnel officers from ARL member institutions, who were engaged via surveys, focus groups, and beta testing.

More Information

For more information, visit the ARL Position Description Bank website, where you will find links to an FAQ and User Guides and Documentation. ARL also plans to offer online information sessions about the ARL PD Bank in the coming months. If you have questions, please contact the project team at ARLPDBank@uflib.ufl.edu or 352-273-2603.


The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.

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