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9 To Follow: Sharing and Expanding Knowledge with Learnist

by Kiersten Bryant, Head Editor, INALJ California

9 To Follow: Sharing and Expanding Knowledge with Learnist

kiersten_bryantI recently discovered the website Learnist. It is a relatively new website that launched in May 2012. It is similar to Pinterest in that it provides a place to collect content from the World Wide Web and organize it into categorized “Boards,” but unlike Pinterest, Learnist is dedicated to learning. The purpose of Learnist, as stated on one of their own Learn Boards is for users to “share what you know and learn new things.” In addition to learning about various topics from Learnist, it is also a useful tool for collecting and organizing information from across the web about a particular subject that you are researching, writing about, or teaching a class on. It provides a place to share your knowledge with others about a topic that you are passionate about. The knowledge that is shared on Learnist is only limited by users’ imaginations, making for a varied and divers range of topics. You can find boards about drinking whisky, cell mitosis and meiosis, Gandhi, the SAT and ACT, and so much more! Most importantly you can find boards about the library and information profession, and topics that are relevant to the field.

I haven’t had a chance to dig deeply into Learnist but I have found some interesting library and career-related Learn Boards:

  • Library Workers and Libraries have content that covers many areas of librarianship and libraries; Libraries has a stronger academic focus. @your library is just one of many boards that provide content related to school libraries.
  • Libraries Inside America’s Prisons contains videos and stories about library services for correctional facilities. I found this board to be very educational as I have little knowledge of what it’s like to work in a prison library.

I have found several Learn Boards that are full of tips and advice for job seekers:

  • Career Advice has articles about job hunting and career advice.

These are just a few examples of what can be found on Learnist. I plan to explore it further, and in the spirit of life-long learning I invite you to do the same!

 

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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