Advice for newish librarians to be

On Saturday, I wanted to help LIS students with advice on how to interview and get a job, but the interviewing workshop got cancelled.  Bummer.  Anyway, I thought it would be good to put down some of my thoughts about how to get a job in this mixed-up crazy library world that we live in.

1) Take the advice of Jenica when building an online identity or presence. She had this presentation way back in 2009. "Yes, You Are Speaking In Public: Some Implications of Building a Personal and Professional Online Presence." (PDF).  Go out there and create a blog or two, and write about what you are interested in.  Write up some book reviews and stick them on the web. If a blog is not your thing, create a nice looking portfolio page for yourself.

2) Post some of your better class papers online.  Put them into E-LIS or something similar.  Submit some of them for journal articles.  Really, many library journals are hungry for content--even from grad students.

3) Learn about why you should license your work with a creative commons license.

4) Follow other librarians or library organizations on Twitter to see what they are discussing.

5) Take a look at the advice from others such as this and this and this and this.

6) Once you interview for jobs, think of the process as you interviewing them.  You want to see how well their culture will fit with your personality.

7) Remember that once you get a job, the learning ain't done.  You will need to continue learning stuff, so keep reading and going to conferences and meeting people with new perspectives.

Added 4/18:

8) Here are some other semi-random articles/blog posts on nailing the interview for a library job, what not to do at an interview, and networking.