Salaries for public university data librarians and manager/directors of research data services. The salaries were adjusted for cost of living using Wolfram|Alpha’s Relocation Calculator to apply a multiplier for moving to Los Angeles. This was done by searching Wolfram Alpha with interpreted keywords moving from ann arbor to los angeles salary $75,000 for each location, e.g. moving from ann arbor to los angeles salary $75,000. This will show you an equivalent salary based on a number of factors (groceries, housing, healthcare, transportation, etc.) expressed as total cost of living multiplier. I then applied this multiplier to the publicly available salary of data librarians in my study.

The summary statistics of 26 data librarians’ salaries. This shows the min, median, mean and max of the adjusted ranges.

summary(dlib$col_adjusted)
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##   82870   91620  103900  108900  122900  160200

To get a sense of where these salaries come from:

cbind(table(factor(dlib$university)))
##                                    [,1]
## CofRhode Island                       1
## James Madison                         1
## NCSU                                  1
## Purdue University - West Lafayette    2
## Rutgers                               2
## UC Davis                              2
## UCB                                   1
## UCSB                                  1
## UCSD                                  1
## UMich                                 3
## UNC-CHAPEL HILL                       3
## Univeristy of Tenn                    2
## University of Illinois UC             1
## UVA                                   5

Finally, while gathering the salary data for comparison, I classified the individuals’ jobs based on how the library represented what they do. Data Service means that the librarian provides data services that include consulting and instruction on tools and working with data. RDM Consulting indicates that the job is presented as primarily consulting around research data concerns. Data Reference was applied when the individual did not have technical data elements in their represented service offerings, but did provide data discovery and reference services. Finally, Mangement/Director was added when the individual had director or manager in their job title.

## Scale for 'colour' is already present. Adding another scale for
## 'colour', which will replace the existing scale.

To look at just the Management/Director salaries we can see that the spread is from $95K to $160K with a mean of $130K and a median of $128k:

summary(dlib$col_adjusted[dlib$service_offering=="mgmt"])
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##   95600  110700  128800  130600  148200  160200