Interviews, Success Stories

Kate Gray …In Six

My interview with success story Kate


Naomi: How did you find your current job?
Kate: I have been looking at INALJ’s daily digest every day for about six months, and also added several New England library job boards to my RSS feed. I’m not sure whether I found the it in INALJ or the Mass Board of Lib Commissioners. INALJ is an invaluable resource!

Naomi: Favorite library you have been to?
Kate: Poet’s House library in Battery Park, Manhattan is an amazing, free oasis from the crowded city streets. It has an enormous collection of poetry, including small press and chapbooks you can’t find anywhere else. The comfortable couches and tables overlook a beautiful view of the Hudson River.

Naomi: Favorite book?
Kate: Probably 2666 by Roberto Bolano.

Naomi: Favorite thing about libraries / library technology?
Kate: I love how librarians share things with each other. From building a website from scratch to reader’s advisory, you can reach out to the librarian community and find expert advice. Public librarianship is such a radical idea if you think about it: advocating for free services and equal access for everyone.

Naomi: Any websites or feeds or blogs we should be following?
Kate: My favorite library blogs are:

(All those entities are also on twitter).
I also think the tech blogs Boing Boing and Ars Technica are great resources for librarians, especially those interested in copyright reform and open source software.

Naomi: Best piece of job hunting advice?
Kate: It’s never too early to start! I started looking for full-time jobs at least six months before graduating, just to get a feel for what was out there, and applying three months before graduating. Also: get someone who has hiring experience to read over your resume/ cover letter before you send it out!


Kate Gray is a soon-to-be graduate of Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science. After graduation, she is moving from Brooklyn to central Massachusetts to start her first full-time library job as Electronic Resources Librarian at a public library. During library school she has focused on instruction in public libraries, including technology, outreach and human information behavior. Before Pratt, she studied literature and creative writing. She loves animals and is getting her dog excited for a bigger apartment and longer walks in Massachusetts!

You can follow her on twitter at @ekaterinagray, also look out for her fiction reviews in Library Journal.

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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