Select Page

What Else Can You Do With Your LIS Skills? Identifying Job Possibilities

Considering transitioning from a traditional LIS job to a job outside the familiar library roles? One of the biggest challenges you’ll face is figuring out how your traditional skill set “maps” to non-LIS positions.

In an effort to create a group of questions that could be replicated for each LIS role, I decided to take one job – reference librarian – and see how it could be taken apart as an LIS role and then parsed into non-LIS opportunities. A caveat here: I’ve never actually been a reference librarian, but have colleagues who’ve been willing to share their reference-librarian experiences with me, so this represents my best-guess interpretation of basic reference-librarian skills.

Here’s the process I would go through to map this role:

(more…)

Where Will We Fit In?

One of the ongoing challenges LIS students and professionals face is trying to figure out what skills, experience, and attitudes will enable us to make a viable contribution in the evolving workplace, be it traditional facilities-based librarianship, special librarianship, or some type of alternative LIS work.

In an effort to nail down some (any!) answers to this tough question, I tend to read as much as I can about the future of work in organizations, and recently came across an interesting publication published March 10, 2011, by the Aspen Institute, “The Future of Work: What It Means for Individuals, Businesses, Markets and Governments,” by David Bollier.

(more…)

What Does Curation Nation Mean for LIS Professionals?

Recently I’ve been reading a book by Steven Rosenbaum called Curation Nation: Why the Future of Content is Context (McGraw Hill, 2011).

Rosenbaum’s premise is based on two ideas: “First, curation is about adding value from humans who add their qualitative judgment to whatever is being gathered and organized. And second, there is both amateur and professional curation, and the emergence of amateur or pro-sumer curators isn’t in any way a threat to professionals.”

(more…)

Looking for Invisible LIS Jobs – What Search Terms?

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?
(more…)

Should New Grads Take Non-LIS Jobs?

Soon-to-be-grads are starting to look for jobs, and many who’d targeted public or academic jobs are finding few opportunities. They are, however, finding other jobs that could make use of their skills. If they take these non-traditional-library jobs, will they damage their ability to land future jobs in traditional libraries should those jobs open up?
(more…)