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.

The Sky Isn’t Falling

by Amelia Zavala Vander Heide, Head Editor, INALJ NYC The Sky Isn’t Falling Looking for a job can be extremely stressful, overwhelming, and time consuming.  Whether you have some professional experience or no professional experience, like me when I graduated, the job hunt can start to seem insurmountable. No matter how many times someone tells…

The Skinny on Cruise Ship Librarianship

by Rebecca Vogler, Head Editor, INALJ Nevada The Skinny on Cruise Ship Librarianship If you’ve been around INALJ.com since the beginning of last year, you may remember a couple of Success Stories that were written about newly minted MLIS graduates going to work as a cruise ship librarian.  One was written about me.  That article,…

Guerrilla Storytime

by Kate Kosturski, Head Editor, INALJ Rhode Island Guerrilla Storytime I went to the Networking Uncommons at the 2014 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia with only one purpose: to Charge All the Things. (Which is why many of us use the Uncommons, really.)  It just happened that the time I showed up to…

January 2014 Roundup (INALJ Stats)

Over 4 million total page views reached in January! What a great month!  The big news is we reached over 4 million page views at INALJ.com on 1/13!  In addition it was the best month at INALJ.com for many stats! January’s busiest day was 15,556 views on 1/27, and our busiest week EVER at 86,866 views…

Having A Positive Perspective

by Heidi Greathouse, Head Editor, INALJ Utah Having A Positive Perspective Have you ever felt like life is going against you and things do not go as planned?  I am sure many of us have felt this in the job search world such as when we get rejection after rejection, not getting the promotion we…

Cross-Country Job Searching : An Interview with Derrick Jefferson

This interview is over 1 year old and may no longer be up to date or reflect the interviewee/interviewees’ positions by Caitlin Moen, Head Editor, INALJ Louisiana Cross-Country Job Searching : An Interview with Derrick Jefferson Current Position: Communications Librarian at American University, Washington, D.C. Twitter Handle: @geekandahalf Caitlin:  When you began job-hunting, what criteria…

Navigating the Bend in the Road

by Angela J.A. Kent, Head Editor, INALJ-Virtual Work Navigating the Bend in the Road The bends in one’s career path can appear with little or no notice or be well-mapped out ahead of time. They are those turning points when you start or leave a job; matriculate or graduate from an academic program; relocate for…

Digital Monographs: There’s Still a Long Way to Go

by Clayton Hayes, Head Editor, INALJ North Dakota Digital Monographs: There’s Still a Long Way to Go In many libraries, especially academic libraries, remote resources have become more or less a standard.  It has come to be expected that an academic library will have access to a wide variety of scholarly materials, both in the…

Library Workshops and Seminars for the United Kingdom in 2014

by Suzanne Schultz Pick, Head Editor, INALJ UK Library Workshops and Seminars for the United Kingdom in 2014 While searching for your library job, it’s important to keep up to date on library events and news. Even if you’re not working in a library, keeping yourself involved in the library world gives you important skills…

Darn those Tough Interview Questions!

by Roselle Pendergast, Head Editor, INALJ Minnesota Darn those Tough Interview Questions! We’ve all had those questions asking us to describe a certain situation or experience and how we handled it.  Time and again, we’ve either sailed through it or froze up and stammered out our answer. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing…

Takeaways from Teen Programming

by Nicolas Resteiner, Head Editor, INALJ Mississippi Takeaways from Teen Programming Just recently I was given a promotion from Page to Library Assistant at my library. Besides giving me a much more varied and depth everyday experience at my job, it opened the door to working with a mentor on some teen programming. After some…

10 Inspiring Pinterest Collections Created by Libraries and Librarians

by Kiersten Bryant, former Head Editor, INALJ California Originally published 3/1/13 10 Inspiring Pinterest Collections Created by Libraries and Librarians Something that I have realized while job searching is that there are a lot of interesting places that information professionals can use their skills – places that I had never heard of or knew existed.…

Taking a Career Inventory

by Christina Wilson, Head Editor of INALJ Alberta and INALJ Manitoba Taking a Career Inventory The beginning of a new year is a reminder to reflect on your career over the last year.  It’s also a good time to conduct an inventory how things went over the preceding year.  What went well?  Of which accomplishments…

How to Create an Awesome Twitter Account

by Fallon Bleich, Head Editor, INALJ Arkansas How to Create an Awesome Twitter Account What a great year INALJ has had! In just a short time, we’ve created a great resource for library job seekers and a small LIS community that’s growing every day. Sometime around the middle of the year, many of us head…

So You’re Thinking about being a Head Editor…

by Nena Schvaneveldt, Lauren Bourdages, and Kate Kosturski So You’re Thinking about being a Head Editor… About a year ago, a plucky group of people said yes to a new venture – being head editors on states pages on INALJ. Some are staying, some are going, leaving openings for future Head Editors. If you’re thinking…

Celebrate Banned Books Year Round!

by Leigh Milligan, Head Editor, INALJ Pennsylvania Celebrate Banned Books Year Round! So a few weeks ago I was shopping at my favorite tea shop in Historic Smithville NJ when I found this gem: Which then reminded me I never wrote part 2 of my 2 -part Banned Books Week Blog, so here it is!…

Staying Sharp While You Search

by Emma Pinault, Head Editor, INALJ Delaware Staying Sharp While You Search If you don’t find a librarian position soon after you finish library school, it can be a challenge to keep your skills sharp and your knowledge of the field up to date during an extended job search. This can be even harder if…

Reflecting on my first year as a Head Editor

by Amanda Viana, Head Editor, INALJ Massachusetts Reflecting on my first year as a Head Editor As the end of the year approaches I, like most people, have found myself reflecting on the past year. It hasn’t quite been a year since I started as the Head Editor of the INALJ MA page, but a…