Nico Carver …Success Story

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My interview with success story Nico

Naomi: How did you find your current job?
Nico: I first saw the job listed on the inalj daily digest (now all online)! I immediately knew I wanted to apply. Over the next few days, many of my colleagues sent me the same job posting. I made sure to have many sources of information in my job hunt, so that no opportunity would be missed. It’s good to have a safety net!

Naomi: Favorite library you have been to?
Nico: I like small libraries. My favorite is the Pondok Pekak Lending Library in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. When I was studying abroad, Pondok Pekak was my only source of books in English. The smaller selection of materials made me much more likely to browse and read books I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Some examples that profoundly impacted my thinking: Kōbō Abe’s Woman in the Dunes, Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Lynn Margulis’s Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation.

Naomi: Favorite book?
Nico: Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There is that rare work, where the film adaptation only strengthened my appreciation for the book.

Naomi: Favorite thing about libraries/ library technology?
Nico: I love that libraries are increasingly adding options to make stuff. I am biased since this is my little niche of librarianship, but providing the technology and staff to allow people to create rich multimedia is awesome. I expect to see more media centers in all kinds of libraries in the future.

Naomi: Any websites or feeds or blogs we should be following?
Nico: Jessamyn West’s librarian.net, Lawrence Lessig @lessig, Kevin Smith’s copyright blog. For job searching, I used inalj, ALA job list, the Chronicle of Higher Ed. List, and the SILS job list

Naomi: Best piece of job hunting advice?
Nico: Get as much experience as possible before graduating Library School. Internships, field experience, and part-time jobs will get you noticed. After that, I suggest people go for quality over quantity in applying to jobs. I only applied to jobs that I was completely qualified for, and sounded interesting to me. This meant I only applied to six jobs, but I put a full week into each cover letter. I used basically the same resume for each job, but worked on it for a month, and had three different career counselors review it.

Nico is an experimental filmmaker turned librarian. He is currently a graduate student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He will be graduating in May and moving to Newark, Delaware where he accepted the position of Coordinator of Student Multimedia Design Center Services at the University of Delaware. Nico is very excited about his new job because he loves helping people with their media projects.

Reposted from 5/2/12 and 8/29/12

Formerly titled, Nico Carver …In Six

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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