Interviews, Success Stories

Alicia Schofield …In Six

My interview with success story Alicia


Naomi: How did you find your current job?
Alicia: I found the job posting through a job listserv that the U of I’s library school hosts.

Naomi: Favorite library you have been to?
Alicia: The closed stacks of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

Naomi: Favorite book?
Alicia: This month my favorite book is Mastiff by Tamora Pierce.

Naomi: Favorite thing about libraries/ library technology?
Alicia: My favorite thing about libraries is the wonderful and surprising things you find yourself interested in when you stumble upon them by browsing. Thanks to random browsing at my local public library I’m now a big fan of Russian Life Magazine.

Naomi: Any websites or feeds or blogs we should be following?
Alicia: For professional information: www.askamanager.org; for fun: www.bookshelfporn.com

Naomi: Best piece of job hunting advice?
Alicia: 1. 1) Any experience is better than no experience. Start volunteering immediately after graduation. I did not volunteer for the first nine months of unemployment because I was convinced that I’d get a job tomorrow or the next day and that hurt me. After the first several months, I started splitting my focus between putting in job applications and getting whatever experience I possibly could.
2. 1) DO NOT GIVE UP! Keep applying. I often told myself, “You can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket; you can’t get a job if you don’t apply.”

Alicia Schofield earned a BA in English Literature from Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, where, she helped saved the 130-year-old student newspaper from dying. Immediately following undergrad, she enrolled in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science. While earning her MSLIS, Alicia worked on the early stages of the Google Library Project, served the Asian American Studies Program as a graduate assistant, and worked as a consultant for the Writers Workshop. During the two and a half years that it took Alicia to find a full-time library-related job, she volunteered at the Library School’s Center for Childrens Books, the University YMCA, and U of I Map & Geography Library. She paid the rent by working as an organic bread baker. Alicia’s professional interests are in preserving intellectual freedom and facilitating access to information.

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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