Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: Are They Out There?


Danielle Quinnette, Editor


Taking care of the job board on the 6th floor this semester and seeing the job notices come in has caused me to take another look at what will be available after I leave SIS in August. I decided to start looking at job resources to see what's out there and I thought I would share my findings in the hopes that you might find something helpful for your own search.

There are several sources of job notices available at SIS. There is a bulletin board on the 6th floor with job notices for public, school, special, and health science libraries and archives in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and West Virginia. These notices, ones for the rest of the U.S., and those in other countries are in the job books on reserve in the Information Sciences library on the 3rd floor.

Several of the library science journals in the library here also include job announcements. Library Journal, American Libraries,and School Library Journal are just a few examples. A couple of on-site recruitment visits are planned at SIS. The Brooklyn Public Library was here on February 15th. Sue Weston and Mike Eitner, who set up appointments with Brooklyn, said that it was less of an interview and more of an informational meeting where they talked about their library system. Sue said that Brooklyn seemed like a good place for a librarian in search of a first job to gain experience.

With people doing everything from e-mailing to buying books online, it is not surprising that there are an incredible number of job notices and services on the Web.

Some of these Web job sites are the ALA employment page at www.ala.org/education, the Library and Information Science JobSearch at carousel.lis.uiuc.edu/~jobs/, and the Library Job Postings on the Internet found at topcat.bridgew.edu/%7Esnesbeitt/libraryjobs.htm. Pittsburgh Area Library Jobs (www.sla.org/chapter/cpit/jobs.htm) is devoted to jobs in the city of Pittsburgh.

The things I have mentioned here are only a few of the places one can look for job announcements, of course. Word of mouth, the classified section of the newspaper, job services at the Web search engines, and places such as ALA conferences are other ways in which jobs can be found.