Best Regional Job sites

by Alexis Stapp, Head Editor, INALJ Minnesota

Best Regional Job sites

alexisstappAs a seasoned job hunter, you probably have some key websites you check daily for jobs, and/or subscribe to RSS feeds and are on various listservs.  INALJ is one of them, obviously!, but the ALA JobList makes the cut, too, I’m sure.  Perhaps the SLA Career Center is on there, or the SAA Online Career Center, or the AALL Career Center, depending on your goals and experience.  These are the biggies, the heavy-hitters in the library job world, and are all excellent resources.

When I was embarking on my job search, I made sure to follow all these, whether via RSS feeds, Twitter, or daily check-ins to their websites.  I also made a list of about 30 other RSS feeds, listservs, etc., all of which I did buy going through all the INALJ state pages one by one and culling from the resources listed.  Of course, I was open to relocation so that gave me a lot to work with.  I realize that’s not the case for everyone so I’m sharing some of the best regional resources for job listings:

Mountain Plains Library Association – MPLA covers 12 states so there are a lot of jobs posted here!

Pacific Northwest Library Association

Library Jobline – focused on Colorado but posts jobs in other Southwestern states and their RSS

Jobs in Libraries (GA & Southeast)

Texas Library Association

New England Jobline, hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College

Metronet Libraries Jobline – Minnesota jobs postings mainly but occasionally posts for Wisconsin, Iowa, or the Dakotas

California Professional Jobs – hosted by the Department of Information Studies at UCLA

I know most of these are duplicates from individual INALJ state pages but thought it would be good to have them collected in one space.  Of course, don’t forget to check out individual INALJ state pages – if you don’t know, each page has local resources after all the job postings.

Also, if you are not currently an RSS user, I highly recommend using them for job hunting.  It’s a great way to gather a lot of job postings all in one place which makes it so easy to filter through them.  Sadly Google Reader is defunct but here’s a helpful round-up of RSS reader options (from Gizmodo).