librarian.net

I rarely post links to job here because it seems to me that most postings for library jobs are more or less the same. This one is different. The Open Library project, which I linked to here before, is looking for some new folks. You’d be working with a fun team of geniuses, most notably Karen Coyle who is the chief librarian of the project. Telecommuting an option. Interested? Read the job description, then email Aaron and tell him you heard about it here.

Tasks include: working with our chief librarian, Karen Coyle, to implement algorithms to do data merging and other processing tasks; writing scrapers and crawlers to grab various data sources; writing importers to parse this data into something that can be imported into our database; and managing all the people who want to help us with these tasks.

Walt Crawford received his termination notice from OCLC. I was really hoping he’d be one of the people they kept and apparently so was he. He’s now 61 and looking for work. In the library profession this shouldn’t be impossible, but it’s always a pain in the ass. If you’ve got a need for someone with his background, experience or attitude, don’t wait, drop him a line.

I’d like to see some sort of Librarian Dream Jobs blog that had all these funky jobs like this one: “Poster Archivist. The Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) is seeking an experienced, detail-oriented professional to oversee the cataloging, preservation, and management of its unique domestic and international political poster collection.”

The president of NYPL makes over $800,000 a year even as NYPL is selling assets to raise needed funds and NYPL has some of the lowest starting salaries of any urban library system. For shame. [juice]

I’ve been fascinated to see how the jobs for librarians have been changing, just over the time I’ve been a librarian. Check out this job for a Head Librarian in a facility that they are predicting will be “bookless” before too long. Information architect for the Veterans Health Administration (posted at MetaFilter jobs, whee!) doesn’t look too librarian-ish, but then you look and see that it’s all about metadata, 508 compliance (accessibility) and controlled vocabularies. It’s been a while since I was actively looking for work, but even scanning LISJobs now is a different experience than it was when the site started. Interesting times to be us.

I did my class project in my Library Services to Special Populations class on prison librarians. I took a trip out to the medium security prison and got to spend some time with the librarian there and learned a lot about both prison libraries and the odd and unique role that libraries have within prisons. This week my landlady’s son is visiting. He is a prison educator. He said they are trying to hire some librarians. I dug up a few links for him in my “Oh have you tried PRISON-LIB, the prison librarians’ listserv?” way and figured I’d drop them in here as well.

• Directory of state prison librarians – the best source for names and numbers
• Library services to adult prisoners in the United States – a good intro and a well-sourced paper
• Internet Resources of Use to (Ex-) Inmates – and more from NYPL
• Three Experts Describe “How to be a Successful Prison Librarian: Preparation for a Foreign Land” – published by the ASCLA division of ALA
• Prison librarians needed: a challenging career for those with the right professional and human skills – a paper given at IFLA, 1999

This is the job my old boss used to have. The library is amazing and 50K will go a long way in ruralish Vermont. I made their website. If you’re at all Vermont-curious, think about applying; I’ll be happy to tell you what I know about the area and I’ve already done a community analysis of the population.

I’m looking around at library careers sites this week after the interesting story about the IMLS grant from a few days back. I was sent a link to the Canadian Library Association’s recruitment-type site, InfoNation. ALA launched their own site at LibraryCareers.org which, given that it’s the ALA website, redirects to http://www.ala.org/ala/hrdr/librarycareerssite/home.htm which is the URL you’d bookmark, no matter what the website says. Check out CLA’s library blog page with its subtle use of RSS feeds (and the inclusion of ALA employee Jenny Levine’s blog, how collegial!). Check out this competencies page that looks like a tag cloud and this page with desktop wallpaper. And who is this handsome man who says “I first became interested in librarianship due to my desire for world domination.”? Wouldn’t you like to find out?

Canada has actually published research about the current and future human resources aspects of librarianship in the The 8Rs Canadian Library Human Resource Study. Their work is something of a response to what we think we already know which, as they put it “the existing literature on recruitment, retention, and leadership in the library profession is based on either anecdotal evidence or aggregate statistics, most of which are American.” You can read the reports they have published here. The woman who emailed me about this sums up one of the results

while there’s no imminent crisis in numbers of recruits, there are issues around competency match between grads and workplace needs, need for leadership and management, etc. In other words, it’s more about personal / professional qualities than the panic about needing “bodies” for our libraries (as was expressed over & over in the literature a couple of years ago).

Priscilla Shontz from LISCareer is finishing up her book on librarian careers. She’s stuck on a few chapters. If you are a library consultant or an international school librarian, would you mind writing a quick and not terribly long summary of what you do? Slightly more details here. Tentative Table of Contents here. Yes, that’s me writing the introduction.

Please, someone awesome take this job.