Tag: jobs

Storming the Gates (New Job, New Place)

Image of Kiyomi Deards a Japanese American Woman with long dark brown hair, bangs, and gold rimmed brown tinted sunglasses in from of a tree with a black sweater and white dress with blue lines.
Kiyomi in Philadelphia

As some of you may know I had a rather whirlwind summer which led to me starting a new job August 2nd as an Assistant Professor with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.

For those of you who read my previous post, Sunday June 27th at ALA Annual was the day I attended my committee meeting for the Residency Interest Group, this was great fun and I think the group is starting to move in a very positive and useful direction.

Sunday was also the day I decided to accept the offer of employment I received from Dean Joan Giesecke of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. This great piece of news really capped the whole ALA Annual experience for me and since August 2nd I have had the great pleasure (and occasional moments of terror) at being an Assistant Professor with the Research and Instructional Section as a Subject Librarian for the areas of Chemistry, Biochemistry, Biological Sciences, and the Cedar Point Biological Research Station.

I highly recommend that anyone else considering a cross-country move try and take more time than I did as it was the definition of chaos to find a place to live, pack, and move in about 3 weeks from the paperwork getting on file with administration. I have to give a lot of credit to the staff in the Dean of Libraries office, and to Bekins/Thornton Moving & Storage for moving both my furniture and my car way faster than the originally estimated. I received everything within 5 days of pickup instead of the 7-15 days I was told to expect. I have to give credit to the university for contracting with such a great moving company (if you try them and have a problem please don’t blame me.)

So now I’ve been here just over a month and this is my first post, why is that? Well there are really two reasons. 1) Unpacking an entire 2 person household mainly by yourself takes forever and the boxes stare at you mockingly, thankfully my husband arrived a couple weeks ago and things are shaping up well, we even bought furniture this weekend at the famous Nebraska Furniture Mart (Yay, I’ll have something to sit on other than a folding chair at home!). 2) The University of Nebraska Lincoln, and its library resources, are huge. Even though I’ve had multiple orientation activities a week (plus 8 thirty minute subject specific one-shots) I expect I won’t complete all of them until November or December which sounds and occasionally feels a bit overwhelming, but overall it’s really great to work somewhere that people want to teach you how they do things so that you can succeed. Between work and home I’ve been running around like a whirling dervish but that is mostly out of my system and I can start moving again with more deliberation as I find my place in the faculty of UNL, as a Librarian, and in Nebraska.

So now that you know basically what I’ve been up to how are you?

Job Resources for Library School Students & Librarians

As promised, here are my picks for library job listings. Please note that this list is geared toward corporate and academic librarianship, although, some public and school library jobs are also posted to these lists. This list of job sources is by no means comprehensive; you should also subscribe to mailing list in your field of interest, search local library association websites, and search for websites dedicated to jobs in the area you are interested in. Topics of job websites range from USA government employee, Higher Education, School (k-12), Information Specialist/Services, to International Jobs.

Things you should keep in mind:

  1. Preferred is not the same as Required, if you meet the Required qualifications and have some of the Preferred go ahead and apply. The more skills that are asked for in the Preferred section the less likely it is that someone has all of them, be willing to learn the ones you don’t have and you could land yourself a job.
  2. I realize that some people have obligations which do not allow them to move, however, being willing to move for a new job gives you a much larger job pool to draw from. Think about what is more important to you, having a job you could love long term or staying within a specific geographic area.
  3. If you are willing to move for a job start going through your possessions now. You own more stuff than you think you do, and time may be limited when it’s time to move. The more you have sorted, donated, and given away the easier it will be when the time comes.
  4. If you follow all of these job feeds you will see a few duplicates and triplicates from time to time. This is to be expected, the majority of the jobs are not double posted.
  5. Do not ever do the final proof of your cover letter yourself. Find a professor, or someone who has been in the profession for a while who has experience hiring, to do the final read through. Not only will this improve your letter significantly, but you will learn things from their corrections that you can apply to the next letter that you write.

Job Lists
http://twitter.com/ALA_JobLIST

Combined Library Jobs – RSS Feed
http://www.lisjobs.com/rss.asp
(Provided by Library Job Posting on the Internet – http://www.libraryjobpostings.org/
And LISjobs.com http://www.lisjobs.com/)

GetLibraryJobs – Twitter
http://twitter.com/GetLibraryJobs

libassociates – Twitter
http://twitter.com/libassociates

Libgig_Jobs – Twitter
http://twitter.com/Libgig_Jobs

Libraryjobonline – Twitter
http://twitter.com/libraryjobline

LibInfoSciJobs – Twitter
http://twitter.com/LibInfoSciJobs

tmj_usa_library – Twitter
http://twitter.com/tmj_usa_library

Lastly I’d like to mention ACRL’s Residency Interest Group (RIG) webpage. RIG not only posts news about current and former residents, we also post residency position openings. There is no other place where residency information is compiled on the web. Check us out and consider a library residency.

http://acrl.ala.org/residency/