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Join SLA

JOIN SLA!

sla-logoSLA Annual Conference is coming up soon and I have been able to attend several DC, MD and VA SLA events the past two months and that has got me thinking about just how much value SLA (Special Libraries Association) has brought to me in my own personal career.  I am a member of DC/SLA, I serve on their Strategic Plan Committee and I have attended many, many trainings and events.  Even when I have traveled other SLA divisions have opened their doors and connected with me from Hawaii to the Arabian Gulf chapters.  When you join you open up a world of learning, training, volunteering and networking opportunities.  I was able to chat and meet with SLA President Deb Hunt this past week at two events, and I appreciate that about SLA, the ability to have a chance to lead and connect from the top down.

So this isn’t a plea really, more of an invitation and a suggestion, to Join SLA.  It has been quite valuable to me in my career and you can make it work for you too.  If you join through my link mention you found it through Naomi House of INALJ 🙂

Cheers and hope you get as much as I have from participating in SLA.  Leadership and short term volunteering opportunities abound!

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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