Articles

Ask Naomi: Where else can I look?

Say you have signed up for the daily INALJ jobs digest email, and subscribe to many listservs/rss feeds, and scan through Indeed.com, and follow companies on LinkedIn but you are feeling like there is something more you can be doing.

There is. One tool I used in previous job hunts was to find the website for a local magazine (in my case Baltimore and the Washingtonian) and find their “Best Places to Work” issues. If the latest issue was not already online I would look at the past year’s results. Then I would go to the company websites and look for jobs there.

Here is a very brief list of some of the cities I have found but a Google search should reap even more results!

  • Baltimore magazine 2011 (the Feb issue in stores has the 2012 list).
  • Boston Globe 2011 issue.
  • Chicago Business News 2011 list.
  • Houston Business Journal 2011 list.
  • Los Angeles Business Journal 2012 list.
  • Seattle Business Magazine 2011 list.
  • The Washingtonian 2011 is the most recent issue.

    • Another idea is to look at the jobs websites for vendors, databases companies that provide libraries services. I used very loose language in my keyword searches such as “research/researcher” or “analyst” as well as “library/librarian”. I interviewed at Thomson a few years back and I found several other interviews that way too.

    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.