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The good news: we know anecdotally that there are LOTS of jobs out there that would be perfect for those of us who have LIS skills. The bad news: those job include titles that make it really, really hard to figure out how to search for them.

Recently I asked the members of the LinkedIn LIS Career Options group to suggest some search terms that we could use to create a LinkedIn jobs feed for the group. We quickly came face-to-face with the dilemma that faces everyone in the profession: We know what our skills are and what we can do with them, but what do other employers call them?

A Starter List of Terms
To get the ball rolling, we came up with these keywords: Archives, business information, business intelligence, business research, competitive intelligence, data curation, digital archives, digital resources, donor prospecting, donor research, executive information service, media resources, medical informatics, metadata, patent research, prospect research, records management, taxonomy, trademark research.

For job titles, we went with: cataloger, content manager, content strategist, digital resources manager, government information specialist, indexer, information architect, information professional, information researcher, information specialist, informationist, knowledge manager, legislative analyst, subject specialist, taxonomist.

What Other Terms Might Produce Good Hits?
Without doubt, this is a preliminary and incomplete list, but can at least get job research started. We’ll continue to add keywords and titles, but would appreciate any other suggestions for keywords and/or job titles that you think will be helpful for LIS professionals searching for opportunities to use their skillsets in non-LIS environments.

We’d like to make the list as encompassing as possible. For example, what are all the non-LIS terms that might relate to cataloging skills? What are all the descriptor variations for user services? And what other approaches might prove useful in sussing out these “invisible” jobs? We’re not looking for terms like “medical librarian,” which are pretty self-evident, but for those terms that don’t have “library” in them.

Please share your ideas, and any resources you’re aware of that might help us put this “job research map” together!