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OSU Libraries & Press
Promotion & Tenure Review, Promotion in Rank Review, and Post-tenure Review Guidelines and Procedures
Approved July 2018

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These guidelines should be reviewed annually by the OSULP Promotion & Tenure Committee to ensure compliance with OSU guidelines and to make necessary and timely revisions. Updates should be approved by LFA by May 30 of each year to be in effect for the next cycle of dossier preparation and review.
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 General Criteria for Promotion and Tenure or Promotion in Rank

 General Promotion and Tenure Criteria for Professorial Faculty

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Specific Criteria for Promotion and Tenure or Promotion in Rank

Teaching Criteria

Context

While OSU Libraries’ faculty members have a wide variety of professional duties, we share one goal: to help all members of the OSU community find, organize, share, and use the information they need to create new knowledge. Working directly and indirectly with students, faculty, staff, alumni and the broader community served by Oregon’s land grant university, the library faculty makes significant contributions to the teaching mission and learning environment of the university. Library faculty members work independently, and in partnership with OSU colleges, departments, and programs to accomplish these goals.

The OSU Libraries serve a broad and diverse community, including students, staff, faculty, professional colleagues, and the public. We tailor the content of our instruction and its delivery to meet the needs of these multiple populations.

Audience

The faculty member’s position responsibilities determine the appropriate audience for their teaching activities. Some faculty members work directly with undergraduate and graduate students, building their research skills. Some provide professional development to OSU faculty and researchers. Others will focus on library audiences, internally to build the capacities of library staff and externally teaching LIS courses and leading workshops for professional colleagues. We also teach members of the public, share information resources, and inform policymakers.

Teaching Philosophy

OSU librarians take a learner-centered approach, incorporating a variety of collaborative and active learning techniques. We respect the knowledge and experience our audiences bring to their learning and reinforce the understanding that learning is a dynamic, epistemic, and recursive process. We are committed to working with our audiences to help them excel as lifelong learners, able to meet the challenges of their professional, educational, or co-curricular landscapes.

Teaching Methods

An OSU Libraries faculty member considers the educational setting and the learner’s needs in order to design effective learning experiences and environments. The faculty member should develop proficiency in the pedagogical practices they are most likely to use. These include (but are not limited to) the following:

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• Standalone workshops

• Tutorials and learning objects

• Manuals or user guides

• Online help tools

• Guest lectures or presentations embedded in courses

• For-credit courses in person or online

• Not-for-credit courses in person or online 

• Education-oriented outreach events

• Internships and other experiential learning

Evaluation

Evaluation varies depending on the methods, audience, and goals. While the specifics of the delivery and content of instruction may vary, instructional efforts should include an evaluation component that addresses how the faculty member will determine if the audience’s needs or expectations were met.

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• Tenured faculty seeking promotion to full Professor should produce a body of scholarship that demonstrates a consistent commitment to research. After 6 years, the candidate may consider submitting their dossier for review. This body of work should extend the faculty member's research program to reflect collaboration beyond the OSU Libraries, a recognized reputation for expertise, significant impact on scholarship and practice in the relevant fields, and a willingness to tackle challenging topics. All the pieces should form a cohesive picture of the faculty member as a librarian and a researcher.

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Context

• Tenure-track and tenured library faculty have a responsibility to engage in scholarship and creative activity. Scholarship and creative activity are understood to be intellectual and applied work that takes diverse forms; are documented; have their significance validated through peer evaluation or critique; and, are communicated to external audiences in appropriate outlets.
• Scholarship and creative activity derive from many activities, including but not limited to:
  • research contributing to a body of knowledge;
  • development of new technologies, materials, methods, or educational approaches;
  • integration of knowledge or technology leading to new interpretations or applications;
  • seeking competitive grants and contracts (particularly when the grants are highly competitive and peer-reviewed) can be a component of achievement in scholarship;
  • information or data discovery, integration, application, or the teaching of information/data concepts;
  • work on steering committees, funding agency panels, and editorships where the documented outcome shows a fundamental change in the field's direction.
• Scholarly Communication
  • As a faculty, we support open access to our research and recognize and value the changing nature of scholarly communications in academia. Faculty members consider access issues when choosing where to publish. We prefer journals and other outlets that protect our rights to share our work broadly over those publishers and venues who limit them.
• Scholarship Expectations
  • Faculty are expected to demonstrate continuous scholarly productivity and to communicate that scholarship to appropriate audiences. Doing so allows scholarly work to mature and for its impact to develop. Typically, faculty produce at least one significant piece of scholarly output annually, throughout their career.
  • All the pieces of scholarly output should form a cohesive picture of the faculty member as a librarian and a researcher. New faculty will benefit from discussing research directions with their supervisor and/or mentor. Often these are refined or revised as the research develops and the position's duties evolve.
• Audience
  • Library faculty communicate their work to build new knowledge and to have an impact on the collection, management, preservation, and use of information at OSU and beyond. The audiences and the relevant communication modes may vary for each piece of scholarship or creative activity. Scholarship relating to non-LIS disciplines is acceptable provided that the contributions to the discipline emphasize an aspect of the faculty's primary assignment or connect in some way to library and information science.
• Impact
  • Impact of scholarly and creative work must include an articulation of the importance of the problem explored and is measured in a variety of ways including dissemination and use. Because impact indicators are difficult to interpret without context, it is important to provide descriptions of the nature and importance of the problem explored, and how the findings have impacted the conversation in the candidate's field. Evidence of the breadth of dissemination of the work can include both qualitative and quantitative metrics, e.g., descriptions of stories in the media, pageview statistics, h-index, or alternative metrics. Evidence of how peers and practitioners used the work can also demonstrate impact. Examples can include both qualitative and quantitative indicators of impact, e.g., citation counts, incorporation of the work into instruction or services, adoption of code, and requests for presentations and consultancies. Impact information can appear both in the CV and in the Candidate's Statement portions of the dossier.
• Collaboration & Authorship
  • The profession is highly collaborative by nature and this is reflected in our approach to scholarly endeavors. We value collaboration because many of the issues we research require a variety of expertise to explore and provide meaningful solutions. Faculty document their contributions to collaborative scholarship so that their unique roles and contributions are highlighted and understood. Individual research projects and scholarship are also valued, but not more so than collaborative work. Faculty are also encouraged to document the contributions to scholarship for which they may not be listed as authors, such as contribution of datasets, computer code, or survey instruments to subsequent scholarly products.
• NOTE: Adopted October 2011, Updated Spring 2016

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• Candidate's dossier submission deadline. The candidate submits the required dossier materials (see template on shared drive) in PDF format to their supervisor for inclusion in the final dossier. Candidate also submits PDF copies of, or links to, all publications (except monographs).
• The supervisor reviews the dossier for completion and then forwards the dossier to the Associate Dean, or Dean , as needed, Library Administration Executive Assistant, and P&T Committee Chair.

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• *NOTE: exact deadline posted on OSU P&T website
• The Dean of Libraries submits the completed dossier to the Office of Faculty Affairs to be reviewed by the campus Promotion and Tenure Committee. In addition, a copy of the completed dossier is placed in the Libraries' personnel files.
• When all necessary reviews and discussions have been completed, the Provost and Executive Vice President will make the final decision on promotion and indefinite tenure.

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In the case of a negative decision, the basis for the denial will be stated, along with information on the right to appeal. Faculty not approved for promotion and tenure by the Provost and Executive Vice President may appeal to the President within two weeks of receipt of the letter announcing the decision. Extenuating circumstances, procedural irregularities that were not considered by the Provost and Executive Vice President, and factual errors in the evaluations are grounds for appeal. When appealing, the candidate should write a letter to the President stating which of the above criteria for appeal applies, and stating the facts that support the appeal. No other supporting letters will be considered. The President has the right to request additional information.
After the University level review is finished, the complete dossier is retained temporarily in the Office of Faculty Affairs. The dossier is subsequently returned to the Dean of Libraries, typically at the start of the next academic year. After confidential letters have been removed, the dossier is retained as part of the faculty member's personnel file.
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Promotion to Full Professor

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Dossier preparation by the candidate typically takes place during Spring and Summer preceding submission, though teaching reviews will generally take place earlier. Candidates work with their supervisor to prepare the dossier. The candidate will be gathering student evaluation of teaching, consultation, advising, or mentoring data for each year leading up to dossier submission. OSULP interprets "students" to be constituents, internal or external to OSU, for whom the candidate has provided instruction, consultation, advising, or mentoring. During the year preceding dossier submission, the candidate will collect student names and email addresses for student review of teaching/consultation/advising/mentoring letters.
By March 1

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• *NOTE: exact deadline posted on OSU P&T website
• The Dean of Libraries submits the completed dossier to the Office of Faculty Affairs to be reviewed by the University Promotion and Tenure Committee. In addition, a copy of the completed dossier is placed in the Libraries' personnel files.
• When all necessary reviews and discussions have been completed, the Provost and Executive Vice President will make the final decision on promotion and indefinite tenure.

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Dossier preparation typically takes place during Summer and Fall terms preceding submission, though teaching reviews will generally take place earlier. Candidates work with a mentor (if applicable) and their supervisor to prepare the dossier. The candidate will be gathering student evaluation of teaching, consultation, advising, or mentoring data for each year leading up to dossier submission. OSULP interprets "students" to be constituents, internal or external to OSU, for whom the candidate has provided instruction, consultation, advising, or mentoring. During the year preceding submission, the candidate will collect student names and email addresses for student review of teaching/consultation/advising/mentoring letters.

Per Rick Settersten - Effective for the 2023-2024 promotion cycle, the University will no longer require external letters of evaluation for promotion to the ranks of (1) Senior Instructor I & II, (2) Senior Faculty Research Assistants I & II, and (3) Senior Research Associates I & II. This is a pilot year during which these letters will be eliminated, not optional. University Human Resources and the Office of Faculty Affairs will collect data and revaluate this decision at the conclusion of the AY23-24 promotion cycle. 

The OSUL P&T committee will determine what updates should be made to our guidelines regarding the external review letter process after University Human Resources and the Office of Faculty Affairs have completed their evaluation of the change in external review letter process in 2024.

By March 1

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Peer Review of Teaching Coordinator

The Peer Review of Teaching Coordinator (Coordinator) is a tenured library faculty member and member of the Promotion & Tenure committee. The coordinator is typically selected by the new P&T Committee Chair and serves a one-year term, September - August. 

Procedure for Peer Review of Teaching

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Per the OSU promotion and tenure guidelines, students will be invited to participate in the review of faculty for promotion and tenure. OSULP interprets "students" to include all constituents of the candidate's teaching audience, internal or external to OSU, for whom the candidate has provided instruction, consultation, advising, or mentoring. The following guidelines from the OSU Promotion & Tenure Guidelines (Student Letter of Evaluation section) have been modified for OSULP.
The purpose of the student evaluation letter is to document the student perspective of the candidate's effectiveness as a teacher, research consultant, advisor (if applicable), or mentor (if applicable). In order to provide the university with a consistent source of information for the process, the unit P&T committee and the unit supervisor should endeavor to organize student committees for faculty evaluation using the following process.
NOTE: the timeline below specifically addresses the Associate Professor and Professor reviews. Timeline modifications for Senior Instructor I/II review and Faculty Research Assistant I/II review are specifically noted in those timelines.
By March 15

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• The unit P&T committee and the supervisor jointly generate an additional list of student names taken from class lists of the courses, workshop attendees lists, research consultations, and advisees (if appropriate).
• The supervisor begins to request review letters from the combined list of students. Students graduating in June or August must be contacted before graduation. The supervisor may wish to work with Library Administration Executive Assistant to determine when students are graduating. An attempt should be made to request input from students whose collective experience represents the profile of the teaching, research consultation and advisory (if appropriate) duties of the faculty member. For example, if a faculty member teaches all undergraduate courses, it is appropriate for all letters to come from undergraduates. If the faculty member teaches, consults with or advises a mixture of undergraduate and graduate students, the chosen students' backgrounds should reflect that diversity in order to provide sufficient information to evaluate the candidate's performance.
  • Letters to the students requesting the evaluative reference must inform the student as to who will see their review letters. Access to those letters will be determined by whether the candidate has signed a waiver of access. Students must also be informed that only signed letters will be used as part of the process. Sample letters are available on a restricted shared drive: Shared\P-&-T\Student_review_of_teaching\Sample_letters
  • As a rule, one half of the letters should be from the list generated by the candidate and one half from the list generated by the unit. In practice, the supervisor and candidate work together to generate the list of student names.
  • There is no specific minimum number of letters required. The total number of letters should be on the order of 4-12, depending on the complexity of the candidate's teaching duties.
  • If an insufficient number of students agree to write letters, the P & T Committee and the supervisor should select an additional set of names from the existing lists and request letters from those students.
• Supervisor begins planning the formation of the Student Review Committee in order to have this committee in place by October deadline.

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