Founder
Emily Weak earned her MLIS from San Jose State University in May 2011. She suffers from the curse of being interested in EVERYTHING, and consequently her career and research interests are very broad. She currently works as an on-call librarian, but has been an administrator, cheesemonger, manager, and circus student, among other things.
In her free time, she is one of those librarians who just really likes reading. Get to know her public-professional side through her LinkedIn profile or her public-personal side on her unfocused and neglected blog, MLISsing in Action.
Master Indexer/Transcriber
Sara Beckman is earning her MLIS from the University of Washington with plans to graduate in June 2014. Sara’s interests lie in combining her love of history with the digital world. She hopes to find a job after graduation working in an archive or special collection helping to both digitize historical documents to help to provide wider access and preserving born-digital documents. She is currently working as a digital asset management intern at Sub Pop Records in Seattle, WA, but has also has worked as a cataloging, research, and archival intern as well as a bookseller at her undergraduate’s university bookstore.
In her free time she is also a librarian that loves to read. Most recently she has discovered comics and hasn’t looked back. You can check out Sara’s professional side on her LinkedIn profile. If you want to get to learn more about her journey through library school you’ll want to visit her blog, Local History Girl.
Thank you for starting this, Emily. It will be very helpful to a lot of us.
About being interested in EVERYTHING–my Foundations class professor told us that “librarians are interested in **everything,**” and that’s how I knew I was in the right place.
Thanks, Sharon!
Emily,
What a creative blog idea! As a fellow SJSU MLIS “soon to be” graduate…I thank you for providing us LIS job seekers with an informative and helpful new resource!
Hi Emily, I am really enjoying this blog, & I just recommended it on various listservs (including those for our students and alumni). Well done and I look forward to reading future postings! Thank you~
———————-
Ellen Mehling, MSLIS
Director, Westchester Program and Internships
Palmer Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
ellen.mehling@liu.edu
Thanks for reading and sharing!
Fantastic job, Emily.
I think this is a great idea for a blog. Instead of generic tips, we get perspective and advice from those who are currently or recently involved in the process of hiring librarians. Thanks for working on this and sharing!
Thanks! I’m glad that it is helpful, that makes me feel great!
I wish the respondents to the survey would let us know some “real” reasons why a person won’t make it to an interview or get the job offer. Things like typos, professional dress, and eye-contact are so basic, I imagine that those kinds of things only eliminate the lowest 5% of applicants- but they doesn’t illustrate how one can make it into the top 5% that will actually get somewhere in the interview process.
You’d be surprised! I co-wrote a guest post for this blog a few months ago (http://hiringlibrarians.com/2012/06/07/guest-post-evidence-based-strategies-for-interview-success) about a survey we conducted of 400+ librarians, and LOTS of people make these basic mistakes. Unfortunately, that’s why Emily’s respondents keep saying so. (And FWIW, our survey does address how to succeed in an interview.)
Can you do a mini series on negotiating after being presented with an offer? I think this is an overlooked part of the hiring process, especially for those landing their first professional positions. Maybe create a survey to specifically address issues for that very crucial step in the process? Thanks!
Yes! I’m hoping to create more surveys to address different areas of the hiring process (although it will probably go at a glacial pace), including negotiating. Please let me know if you’ve got more specific questions. In the meantime, there is some discussion of that here: http://hiringlibrarians.com/2012/05/11/further-questions-do-you-have-any-etiquette-tips-for-candidates-who-have-received-an-offer/
You must be reading my mind. I just interviewed for an academic position and they’ve just started calling my references. I’m expecting an offer any day now and the posting actually stated that salary was negotiable so I’m looking for more info.
Hi Emily, I am curious what an on-call librarian is? Can you explain a little about that?
Sure – the short answer is: a substitute librarian.
The longer answer is a bit fuzzier. This is the “about” paragraph from our Facebook group:
And if you really want to read more about it, my research partner Sarah Naumann and I have a project where we’re looking at this kind of work in the SF Bay Area. Our project website, including bibliography, is here: http://librariansworkingoncall.wordpress.com/