I Love These Blogs

by Sheela Sur, Head Editor, INALJ Washington, DC

I Love These Blogs

601183_3798963346349_1244892549_nI realize these blogs are already listed on INALJ, but I really cannot stress enough how much I LOVE them.  I really encourage everyone (especially recent graduates/newcomers to the library job hunt) to check out these two great resources: opencoverletters.com and hiringlibrarians.com.

Even though I’ve received positive feedback about my writing in the past, I am extremely self-conscious and shy about letting people read what I write (I am majorly stressing out about my monthly blog posts on INALJ….).  Open Cover Letters lets me compare my writing to other people’s (maybe I’m not so bad after all?) and I am able to get some great ideas about what to include in my own cover letters.

 Though I feel slightly more comfortable with face-to-face meetings, I think everyone feels some anxiety about job interviews.  Which brings me to Hiring Librarians.  It’s like interviewing your interviewer before an interview — what could be better than that?  I love getting the inside scoop about people who are currently reading resumes/cover letters, conducting interviews, and hiring librarians…! Seriously, just writing about this blog is getting me excited. It is fantastic. 

 sheela1To sum up: If you are a library job hunter, PLEASE check out these resources.  And as a final note, I’d like to add that I am so excited to be the head editor for INALJ Washington, DC!!  Looking at my bio you may wonder why I’m involved in the DC page, but I really do have some connections to the area – perhaps to be revealed in later blog posts.  For now, here’s a photo of me in one of my favourite Smithsonian spaces, ca. 2009….

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. 

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