Interviews, Success Stories

Savannah Gignac …Success Story

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Savannah Gignac …Success Story

savannahNaomi:  How did you find your current job?
Savannah:  I saw the job listed on Archives Gig. During the job search I also checked INALJ, ALA and SAA job listings.

Naomi: Favorite library you have been to?
Savannah:  I think my favorite would have to be the Monte Oliveto Maggiore, located in the hills of Tuscany. The walls are covered in frescoes and the books are breath-taking. No touching though! 😉

Naomi: Favorite book?
Savannah: Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.

Naomi: Favorite thing about libraries/ library technology?
Savannah: My favorite thing about libraries and library technology is being able to help in the process of connecting the public to the material they seek. I love performing reference and promoting the collection one on one, and the fact that a researcher can look at collections from the other side of the world is a wonderful concept!

Naomi: Any websites or feeds or blogs we should be following?
Savannah: I very much enjoy Jill Hurst Wahl’s blog, Digitization 101, the infographic blog, “Many Eyes”, Underground New York Public Library, DigitalKoans, and for some laughs,  Derangement and Description.

Naomi: Best piece of job hunting advice?
Savannah:
1.     Never give up!  It’s easy to get discouraged when you think you are qualified yet cannot seem to get “the job”.  Meet with your grad program’s Career adviser  go over your resume and/or cover letter. Start there.  I thought mine was “good enough”, but learned how I could make it even better. 

2.     Let EVERYONE know you are looking.  A lot of jobs are found out by word of mouth and if you know someone-who-knows-someone, you will already have a friend to sing of your praises to a possible employer.

3.     Apply for LOTS of jobs. Even if something doesn’t seem like the “perfect” job when you read the description, you won’t know until the interview what the job entails. And it may be your dream job!

Savannah Gignac is the Photo Librarian for the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives at the Niels Bohr Library and Archives.  She is originally from Farmington Hills, Michigan, has a B.A. in English, and worked at a publishing company after undergrad. Before working at the American Institute of Physics, Savannah attended the University of Texas, receiving her MSIS in 2012, interned at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Gardens, and worked for a year at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, TX, as Project Archivist in the Photography department. Her main interests include digital humanities, copyright, and photography collections. Besides libraries (duh.), she enjoys live music, art galleries, food trucks, and yoga.

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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