Paraprofessional staff: a review and report on current duty assignment in academic health sciences libraries in North...

This paper reviews paraprofessional employment in libraries and examines the trend toward assigning increasingly complex duties to academic library paraprofessionals. During the spring of 1989, directors of academic health sciences libraries in the United States and Canada were surveyed to determine the duties assigned to paraprofessionals. The results show that paraprofessionals are assigned a wide range of duties, including supervising functional areas, such as circulation and interlibrary loan, and some tasks often considered professional, such as original cataloging and in-depth reference work. The findings illustrate the importance of the paraprofessional to librarianship.