Catherine Wagner …Success Story

This interview is over 1 year old and may no longer be up to date or reflect the interviewee/interviewees’ positions

My interview with success story Catherine – this interview is from last year and Cathy has since found another position at a higher level- congrats Cathy!

Naomi: How did you find your current job?
Catherine: I found my current job on the INALJ daily .pdf. I didn’t hear anything from them for about two months after I applied, and at the suggestion of a friend I called their HR department to follow up on my application. I found out the position was still open, and was given contact information for the hiring manager. I contacted her to let her know I was still interested and find out where they were in the decision process and was contacted for a phone interview the next day. Two weeks and two interviews later I was offered the position. I am now digital librarian for a tech company in the Washington, DC metro area.

Naomi: Favorite library you have been to?
Catherine: It’s hard to pick. I’ve visited several, primarily special libraries. My favorite public library is the Seattle Public Library Central branch. When I lived there, I loved sitting at the tables on the top floor of the book spiral with my laptop and the free wifi, but was easily distracted by the view.

Naomi: Favorite book?
Catherine: One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodi Smith. I think I read it a million times when I was a kid and I still love it.

Naomi: Favorite thing about libraries/ library technology?
Catherine: I love the democratic nature of libraries, in that anyone who wants access to information can get access through a library, whether public, academic, or special (for the most part anyway). It’s so important that well curated and preserved collections are accessible to researchers, students, entrepreneurs, innovators, and anyone who wants to learn.

Naomi: Any websites or feeds or blogs we should be following?
Catherine: These are fun:
http://fluxmachine.tumblr.com/
http://bookshelfporn.com/
http://www.ted.com/talks
and this is my blog: http://lovespeciallibraries.blogspot.com/

Naomi: Best piece of job hunting advice?
Catherine: I think overall the best advice I was given was to just keep busy and keep applying. The keep busy part kept me going through the rough spots, and the keep applying part got me the job.

Catherine Wagner received her Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Washington Information School in June 2011. She moved to the Washington, DC area with her husband in December and embarked on a six month campaign to find a library job. Catherine is passionate about librarianship, enjoys web development and digital information management. She recently accepted a position as digital librarian for Get Well Network.  Then was hired at a federal library and now has another, more senior position, in a different federal library!

 

Formerly entitled Catherine Wagner …In Six and published on 5/1/12

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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