Interviews, Success Stories

Ricardo Figueroa …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 INALJ success story, Ricardo

Naomi: How did you find your current job?
Ricardo: I found my current job using INALJ.  I had been keeping up with the listserv religiously in the last year.

Naomi: Favorite library you have been to?
Ricardo: This is a hard question, I feel that main branch libraries in cities are often an extension or a representative of that city and what it has to offer. I would have to say the Seattle public library for its modernity and pride in Northwest Culture and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh main branch in Oakland because of it architecture and involvement in the community as well as it being one of the places that solidified my interest in the information field when I was in grad school.

Naomi: Favorite book?
Ricardo: I can’t just answer with one, I can honestly say I have two that I always return to.  Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I never cease to be amazed at Adam’s whit, sarcasm, and linguistic playfulness.  My other favorite book has written anonomously in Spain, and is called El Lazarillo de Tormes, its also puckish like The Hitchhiker’s Guide, and was one of my favorite tales as a child living in Spain and Argentina.

Naomi: Favorite thing about libraries/ library technology?
Ricardo: I think for me the thing I love the most about libraries is that it is a place where I can let my mind wander and explore, and bounce from one subject to another. Many people say, “well you can do that on the internet” and while that can be very true, in a library I feel you can make things more tangible.

Naomi: Any websites or feeds or blogs we should be following?
Ricardo: I read the Huffington Post a lot, and Forbes as Library Advocates.  However, I also just use news websites in my case, the Seattle Times or BBC, as a spring board into researching interesting topics.

Naomi: Best piece of job hunting advice?
Ricardo: First off, Patience, secondly, Persistence, thirdly, Networking, and forthly, don’t let rejection define your self worth.  Don’t feel bad if the job that you land isn’t what you wanted, look at it from a point of pragmatism. It will be a source of income while you look for something else.  Try and sell yourself, you are the sum of all your experiences.

I am a Bilingual Software Support Specialist with ProQuest, Serials Solutions, Seattle, WA. I was in born in Boston, MA but moved around a bit as a child having lived in Spain, Argentina, Czech and Slovak Republics and then finally spending the majority of my teenage years in the San Francisco Bay area. I graduated from Towson University where I studied Spanish Literature and Classical Piano performance in 2003. From there, I worked as a bilingual information specialist for the Epilepsy Foundation’s Resource Library, a Records Manager for the EPA, and various other support rolls at the University of Washington and University of Pittsburgh. I completed my MLIS at the University of Pittsburgh in August of 2011. My experiences living in other countries and seeing different libraries and the way other places use, control, and relate to information was one of my reasons for getting an MLIS degree. Currently I am working for ProQuest’s Serials Solutions in Seattle, WA where I assist Serials Librarians in North and South America to manage their electronic subscriptions, databases, and trouble shoot library software. When I am not at work, I am an avid swimmer, classical pianist, and love to practice and study foreign languages.

Previously published 8/16/12 and entitled Ricardo Figueroa …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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