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).
Founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard, INALJ’s 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.com. INALJ has had over 18.5 Million page views and helped thousands of librarians and LIS folk 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 a month.
Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 & 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro. She presents whenever she can, most recently thrice at the American Library Association's Annual Conference as well as breakout talk presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa and as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting, at the National Press Club, McGill University, the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
She was a 2013 Library Journal Mover & Shaker and has served on the University of Maryland iSchool Board from 2014-2017. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has relocated to being nomadic. She runs her husband’s moving labor website, KhanMoving.com, fixes and sells old houses and assists her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food as well. She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. View all posts by Naomi House →
@Edie I’ve been in exactly the same position. I’ve been working in another field doing similar work for the past few years, interviewed for a couple of librarian positions, and realized the numbers were just not going to work right now given the scale of the pay cut I’d be taking. I’ve been saving and trying to get adjusted to a lower standard of living since then, so I can still keep my head above water if/when I do finally go back to a library.
I do understand their feelings. I was lucky that for a short period of time I was in a job that paid well – the job and I parted ways for political reasons not through any desire of mine. I landed a job, taking a significant pay cut, outside of librarianship. The organization claimed they wanted a librarian however, I am not doing anything remotely related to either one of my two Master’s degrees. Recently, I was invited to interview for the type of library position I have long been seeking. It required another significant pay decrease. I tried to convince myself I could manage the pay cut then my car required 1K worth of work and it hit home that I would be living far too close to the financial edge were I to take this dream position. I am highly (read: over) educated and most of the starting salaries for library positions are well below what someone of my educational background and experience should be making. It is a very sad commentary on the value this country places on information professionals.