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4 Sites That Every Librarian Should Know and Show

by Fallon Bleich, Senior Assistant for and former Head Editor of, INALJ Arkansas
previously published 3/18/13

4 Sites That Every Librarian Should Know and Show

fallon.bleichI’m a giant techie and love discovering new sites and sharing them. As a librarian in training, it is even more fun to share the findings with patrons. Below are some of my favorite, absolutely FREE websites that every librarian should not only learn and love, but should also show their patrons:

  • Duolingo (http://duolingo.com/) – Duolingo is my favorite find of 2012. It is a Crowdsourcing website that teaches you a new language while also working to translate real-world content from the Internet. They started with some of the basic languages and over the past few months have slowly added new ones. I’ve had a lot of fun just learning a new language, but it is also a great feeling to be helping with something bigger.
  • Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/)  – Coursera is a site that is full of college level courses that cost nothing to take. What’s more, they are classes taught by real professors from schools across the country, including Ivy League schools. The classes cover a wide range of topics (including some that are perfect for librarians to be) and the site is extremely easy to use.
  • YourNextRead.com (http://yournextread.com/us/#) – Your Next Read is amazing. It takes Reader’s Advisory to the next level and creates spider webs of book suggestions, when you put in a book title, author, etc. I highly recommend this for personal use, but I’ve shown a few friends, as well, and they love it.
  • (As of late 2013, special note this site is now closed.  You can see old versions on the Wayback Machine) Small Demons (https://www.smalldemons.com/) – Reason #599 you should go to conferences: sometimes you get shown brand new things, like this website here. Small Demons is a site that I was shown during ALA Annual 2012 and it is essentially a social media for books, people, places, and things. It links all of those things together, so if you wanted a list of all of the books that take place in Los Angeles or all of the books that mention Freda Kahlo, this would be the site to go to.

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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