Interviews, Success Stories

Brian Rogers …In Six

My interview with success story Brian

Naomi: How did you find your current job?
Brian: Similar to others, I followed INALJ, various blogs, organizational job boards, and listservs. I also benefited from my girlfriend and a small network of colleagues forwarding announcements on a weekly basis. My impending position resulted from one of these email forwards. I hadn’t seen this particular opening, as it was slightly outside the geographic range I had been considering. After discussions around broadening the application scope, and knowing it would entail a move, I began writing the cover letter.

Naomi: Favorite library you have been to?
Brian: The Squirrel Hill branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has been my favorite of the last several years. When I first moved to Pittsburgh for the MLIS program, I spent a lot of time there. Enjoyed the ambience. Enjoyed that it was vibrant and well-used. Enjoyed the architectural layout of patron interaction.

Naomi: Favorite book?
Brian: Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight has enjoyed the top spot for the last decade. Recent reads of which I’m inordinately fond: René Char’s Leaves of Hypnos, Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones, Enrique Vila-Matas’ Bartleby & Co., Marguerite Young’s Angel in the Forest.

Naomi: Favorite thing about libraries/library technology?
Brian: Their continued presence is a communal means of access to a plethora of resources toward any number of needs, which are otherwise unavailable for a great number people in their day-to-day lives.

Naomi: Any websites or feeds or blogs we should be following?
Brian: Past INALJ interviewees have significantly covered this. Anything I could add would be redundant, aside from suggesting that those-in-need also be certain to check for postings in other industries. I applied for a number of local openings within corporate entities that didn’t advertise via traditional libraryland routes. This required some targeted, company-specific searches.

Naomi: Best piece of job hunting advice?
Brian: The pursuit of employment is equal parts an emotional and intellectual challenge. Trying to predict what makes any of us an ideal candidate is an arcane and frustrating science. So beyond the well-documented and straightforward advice we should all follow anyway: endurance and fortitude. Channel disappointment into productive introspection and self-revision.

Born in Georgia. Snagged a BA in English from Emory University in 2000. Wandered around the country for a spell. Picked up an MLIS (APRM Specialization) from the University of Pittsburgh in 2010. Concurrently served as an information assistant (Duquesne) and student conservation technician (Pitt). Been working as a copywriter and software tester since, while building a paper skyscraper comprised from libraryland rejection letters. Mid-April, will begin as Web Design and Instruction Librarian at the University of Tennessee’s Lupton Library in Chattanooga. I am as giddy as can be.

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. 

Tags: