Articles

INALJ is 15 years old!

by Naomi House, MLIS

INALJ is 15 years old!

October 16, 2010 I sat down at my computer and decided to find a way to share the library jobs (and related jobs) that I was finding with my fellow MLIS classmates at Rutgers. I ended up doing far more and reaching far more people than I ever expected to. October anniversaries are hard for me and I never have my INALJ anniversary post ready to go. In 2013 I was laid off during the federal government shutdown and during that time had my first of 5 miscarriages. I grew the site incredibly fast without any institutional or organizational support, however LIS (library and information science) folk, from students to long-term workers, volunteered their time for me and INALJ (I need a library job) and because of them we were able to help even more job seekers find their work. Back in 2016 I scaled back as managing 150 volunteers without funding or admin support wasn’t viable, and I went back to the main focus of finding jobs and sharing them. Sana, my husband joined a few years back, and now we put out lists 3-4 times a week and still hear back from people all the time about how our site helped them find their jobs.

I plan on editing this blog post later on, adding links and more, but for now this will do. Thank you to my husband and 2 sweet kids. Thank you to the over 500 of you who have volunteered with me. Thank you to those who helped me get the site up. And especially, thank you to everyone who has used the site and let me know how it has helped. You are all appreciated!

 

*photo is of Sana and I in Pakistan*

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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