Happy 18th Birthday to INALJ’s Maria House!

by Naomi House, MLIS

Happy 18th Birthday to INALJ’s Maria House!

MariaHouseINALJTwo years ago my sister, Maria, turned 16 and I asked her to join my volunteers with INALJ so she could learn more about WordPress, librarianship, metadata and more. Happy to report she loves the field and is interested now in pursuing museum librarianship. I was nearly 19 when she was born and in college so I remember her entire life growing up really well. But I won’t share embarrassing stories or reminiscences; instead I just want to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Enjoy your last year of high school! Kick butt in tennis! Hang out with friends! Travel! And don’t let anyone get you down. High school is fine but life has the potential to get much, much better! Thanks for being INALJ’s metadata manager and articles editor and here is to a great new year!

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. 

Tags: