It's worth making regular visits to the SLIDE website. In addition to the "legacy" reports from the 2020-23 IMLS-funded project, frequent updates and additions are being made to the site.
Interactive data tools are updated annually to provide ready access to the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
New SLIDE publications are posted on the Publications page. These include reports issued by the SJSU iSchool as well as articles in scholarly journals, professional magazines, and elsewhere. As part of the SJSU incarnation of SLIDE, these include publications focused on the nation as a whole as well as California. (Other states served by the SJSU iSchool will be subjects of future research, assuming data are available.)
The Presentations page includes PowerPoint files for conference and other presentations made by SLIDE staff and partners as well as links to videos of presentations when available.
The News page includes links to publications by others and media coverage of school libraries that includes data from or references to the SLIDE project. These links lead to several excellent examples of how to use SLIDE data to inform education leaders and stakeholders about school librarian employment patterns and trends.
This February 2025 Learning Hub article by Keith Curry Lance and Mary Ann Harlan examines the 2023-24 dataset from the California Department of Education's School Library Evaluation. The focus of this article is identifying how school library programs vary depending on their staffing levels--particularly whether they have full- or part-time teacher librarians or none at all.
This peer-reviewed article in the January 2025 launch issue of Learning Hub, the SJSU iSchool's new online journal for school library research, was co-authored by Caitlin Gerrity of Southern Utah University and Keith Curry Lance of SJSU. It examines the frequency with which schools with librarians lack other kinds of instructional specialists and coaches.
This article in the November 2024 issue of Phi Delta Kappan summarizes the findings of the Voices of Decision-Makers report. The SLIDE project's interviews of school leaders nationwide revealed why they decided to increase or decrease school librarian staffing. It also examined how the factors in those decisions related to each other and to their experiences working with school librarians as administrators and/or teachers.
Data from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing for 2018-19 to 2022-23 indicate that, despite the rarity of librarians in the state's public schools, the current supply of fully credentialed school librarians is consistently insufficient to meet the existing demand for the position. California's Need for School Librarian Education also reports CTC data indicating that the SJSU iSchool plays a critical role in staffing the field, as it is responsible for preparing half of the state's school librarians.
Schools without librarians: First school-level data on the post-COVID era (2024, February). In mid-2023, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released 2020-21 data on school-level staffing, the first such data since 2015-16. The data, which come from the periodic National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS), will next be updated for the 2026-27 school year. The annual librarian staffing data from NCES’s Common Core of Data (CCD) project is available only at district level.