Articles

Keeping Current: Low-Cost Professional Development, March/April Edition

by Adrith Bedore Bicchieri, Head Editor, INALJ Nevada

Keeping Current: Low-Cost Professional Development, March/April Edition

Professional development opportunities can be difficult to take advantage of if you’re unemployed or underemployed. Here are some avenues for gaining new ideas, skills, or perspectives without breaking the bank.

Free online webinars, on a variety of topics:

Grants for attending ALA Annual:

  • The ALA New Members Round Table offers a number of awards to help defray the cost of attending and participating in events at Annual Conference. If you’re planning to be in Chicago, you may wish to consider applying.
  • The NMRT Professional Development Grant awards $1000 to help finance attendance at Annual Conference (airfare, lodging, and registration) – applications due March 31, 5pm Pacific: http://www.ala.org/nmrt/initiatives/applyforfunds/3mawardinformation
  • The NMRT Annual Conference Professional Development Attendance Award provides the winner a ticket to one of the ticketed special events of his or her choice – applications due April 16: http://www.nmrt.ala.org/notes/?p=220

Also see Sarah Deringer’s monthly calendar of Free Webinars!!!

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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