Interviews

INALJ turns 10 today!

by Naomi House, MLIS

INALJ turns 10 today!

Today INALJ is 10 years old and I am so glad that I started this jobs list and website for LIS (library and information science) job seekers. I was in my MLIS program, and had been hired the month before for my first librarian position but wanted a way to share all the jobs I was still finding in one place. October is not the best month for me to do a retrospective and summary, so I will focus on doing one at the end of the year instead. But I do want to say a few short things / link out to some old blog posts of mine.

Though I have done so much more, INALJ, is at heart a jobs site. All the jobs I post may be found at the INALJ Jobs link. As of today the site has had 20,378,494 page views! And I didn’t even start the site until one year into emailing the jobs pdfs (here is the very first INALJ jobs list from 2010) out to thousands of LIS job seekers.

  • THANK YOU! To every person who has donated, who has chosen to sponsor a job posting on the site, and who has donated their time and efforts consistently. I’ve had over 500 volunteers over the years and most are mentioned here. Thank you! I will be catching up on email thanks to all donors soon.
  • THANK YOU! To Elizabeth Leonard, my classmate who was the only person to reply to my call for volunteers when I came up with the idea. She created the FB page (the original one is now closed) and Twitter account.
  • THANK YOU! To Meredith Lowe of Archives Gig who has also been doing this 10+ years for all you’ve done not only to share jobs but to advance the idea that job postings need salaries listed in them.
  • THANK YOU! To all of you who have shared the site and used it for making it as popular as it has been.
  • THANK YOU! To all the interviewees in my 3 current series I started in response to the pandemic jobs crisis
  • THANK YOU! To everyone who has respected my boundaries and shared in this journey, including through multiple miscarriages, health issues and conditions, and the loss of several of my loved ones.
  • THANK YOU! To those who know I am also on the job hunt and have been looking out for me: Ray, Laurie, TD and Danielle
  • THANK YOU! To the current volunteers: Karly Szczepkowski, James Adams, Tracy Wasserman, Rebekah Kati, Iris Jahng, Rose Feuer, Tim Tweed, Tom Dailey & Sarah Eiseman
  • THANK YOU! To my family, my husband Sana Khan who works with me on this site, and our 2 wee ones, Chappell and Johannes (pictured below)

My husband (in a green face mask, black shirt and plaid pants) sitting in our small, cement courtyard holding out 11 month old on his knee and the 3 year old sits to the left smiling. Both are bundled for cold. My husband is Pathan and the children are both Pathan and white

3 years ago I wrote about the site in more detail; feel free to check it out: INALJ turns 7! What it is and what it isn’t. As I wrote then, “job hunting sucks. Not a little bit, but a lot. It can be stressful at best, soul crushing at worst.” Be kind to each other, stand up to bigotries if you see them and have privilege, and do not make demands of other’s time and efforts. To slightly change how I summed it up in that post: I love my life. I love this site as is and hope that it will grow better with time and effort. What it will be will be what I put into it. It is mine. I am proud of these ten years. LIS job hunting is better for having INALJ as a resource and lives have been helped. INALJ is successful because so many find/found it useful, and it all started as a little list for my Rutgers MLIS friends. That rocks!

I’ve met many truly great people who I now call friends through this work and I look forward to meeting more. And one thing you may not know about me is that I actively try and forget names of people I’ve had bad interactions with. I only have 4 I can remember their names in these past 10 years and that is both a natural talent on my part 🙂 and purposeful. I reply, mark as spam and block accounts, then forget. I never go looking for that info either. This means a clean slate for most people because job hunting is hard, we aren’t always our best and we all need space to grow.

Good luck in your job searches and I’ll be here!

If anyone is looking to hire in someone interested in LIS work or sustainable jobs work (librarian jobs, HR related work, etc) I am currently on the job market for myself. I am extremely flexible on location as we live in Budapest, Hungary and Western NY state and have lived all over. I am also available for remote work situations. Please feel free to connect on LinkedIn or email naomi dot house at inalj dot com). I am not, at this time, able to offer job assistance services beyond my daily jobs list to job hunters. Please only contact me if interested in potentially hiring me, not if you are looking for a job. Thank you!

 

 

*header image by Kyle Cassidy

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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