Add 220 Librarians to Your Bookshelves Today!

by Naomi House, MLIS

Yesterday is a day I have long waited for, publication day of Kyle Cassidy‘s,This Is What a Librarian Looks Like: A Celebration of Libraries, Communities, and Access to Information!  How excited was I for a May 17th release?  I pre-ordered on January 3rd.  So, that excited.  🙂  You can order it right now too, here is the link to the Amazon page but you can order from many vendors or just pick it up at your local bookstore or library.

It all started when Naomi Gonzales reached out to a Philadelphia based photographer she had long admired to see if he’d be interested in photographing librarians for a project during ALA Midwinter which was in Philly that year.  Naomi is a former INALJ volunteer and a super-librarian!  She got this ball rolling and her work along with that of Ingrid Conley-Abrams with Kyle led to a SLATE feature called This is What a Librarian Looks Like, featuring many now iconic images of everyday librarians who get up and do the work daily, as well as a Kickstarter for a book and documentary to be narrated by Neil Gaiman, called Alexandria Still Burns: Librarians & the Fight for Knowledge!!!  And now we have the book version in hand available to buy or check out of many libraries!  I use exclamation points a lot you may notice because THIS IS EXCITING! 

So many librarians go to work daily changing lives of their patrons and making society better.  Few get the recognition they deserve.  This book both educates the public on who we are and what we do, but also celebrates in their own words the love we have for this profession!  Ameen <3

My copy will be arriving late next week and I will DEFINITELY be updating this blog post with my own thoughts and plenty of celebrating the many WONDERFUL librarians I call friends, former INALJ volunteers, and library heroes!  Be on the lookout for my updates!!!  And check out some great quotes here.

 

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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