Colleen McClowry …In Six

My interview with INALJ success story, Colleen

Naomi: How did you find your current job?
Colleen: Since I was concentrating on finding work in the Bay Area, I used resources that listed jobs by location. I browsed INALJ’s California listings, search engines like Indeed.com, and the resources available to me at the University of Illinois. As it turns out, I ended up getting my current position through a Recruiter (the LAC group) that was listed on INALJ. For those of you scared off by recruiters–don’t be! They were very friendly and a great resource for someone like me looking in a specific geographical area.

Naomi: Favorite library you have been to?
Colleen: I love to travel, and I try to make it a point to visit libraries of all kinds when I’m doing so. I’ve visited quite a few libraries that I’ve really loved. One of my favorites is the library at the Manga Museum in Kyoto, Japan. I taught English in Japan before grad school, and was continually amazed by the influence Manga has on Japanese culture. Kyoto’s Manga Museum Library was a very relaxed and welcoming place. It felt similar to the Manga Kissas (coffee shops with Manga) found all over Japan. I spent the whole day there reading books from all over the world. It felt pretty surreal to be in there, watching all the comic fanatics ogle over their favorite reads.

Naomi: Favorite book?
Colleen: There’s too many to choose! I guess if I had to pick one it would probably be Native Son by Richard Wright. This book completely changed the way I thought about issues of race and class – its’ themes are so powerful. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, the book also held a special significance to me since that’s where it takes place.

Naomi: Favorite thing about libraries/ library technology?
Colleen: The intellectual stimulation that goes on in library and information settings is my favorite part. No matter what type of library setting you’re in, you can encounter novel technologies and individuals who can teach you new things and enrich your life. Being a librarian to me, in this day and age, is like being a world problem solver and innovator. Our colleagues and patrons are constantly showing us new ways to do things and planting seeds of knowledge that ultimately will help us better share information.

Naomi: Any websites or feeds or blogs we should be following?
Colleen: I admit that before coming to graduate school I was a sort of anti-Twitter, but I must say that Twitter is a fantastic resource for staying up-to-date with the LIS field. It’s especially a great resource for job hunting. Some feeds to follow are: @WeAreLibrarians @ArsTechnica @Resourceshelf @HackLibSchool @LISNews

Naomi: Best piece of job hunting advice?
Colleen: It’s never too late to try something new and change the path you thought you were meant to be on. I studied to be an English teacher during undergrad and look where I ended up – working for a software company : ) In other words, be flexible! I know it sounds cliche, but it’s true. I started graduate school thinking I wanted to go into instructional academic librarianship, but I had an awesome assistantship during my time at GSLIS that totally transformed my interests to being all things IT. When it came to the job search, rather than focus on a type of library, I shifted my thinking to skills sets.

I was born and raised in the great city of Chicago. I studied at DePaul University for undergrad, and taught English as a Second Language before attending graduate school at the University of Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS). I recently finished at GSLIS, and will be starting my career as a Systems Librarian at Innovative Interfaces in Emeryville, CA. When I’m not nerding out at work I enjoy relaxing in coffee shops, cooking, doing yoga, and hiking.

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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