Starting the Post-Grad Job Search – LIS Listservs and Job Boards
Posted January 29, 2024 by Regina Dziergas
Hi Sharks, I hope you’ve had a great start to the spring semester! As I face my last semester and the end of my time in grad school, I thought I’d share some insight into the process of searching for post-grad work. Leaving graduate school for full-time work is a tough transition, and finding a job is the hardest part of that transition, but I’ve found a few resources that have made my search a lot easier.
First, the SLIS Jobline is a lifesaver for finding positions that look to recruit SLIS students or alumni. The Jobline (https://slis-jobline.simmons.edu) accepts postings from organizations who send in their job listings hoping to recruit from our SLIS community, and provides postings from a wide variety of organizations spanning all of the degrees and concentrations offered at SLIS. Listservs like Jobline are great resources to access these postings without having to track them down from individual organizations’ websites, and it’s incredibly useful to have a Simmons-run career platform specifically concentrated on positions in libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other companies/community organizations looking for current and/or former SLIS students. It definitely helps streamline the search process to have all these organizations’ postings in one place, and I particularly appreciate the ability to sort positions by category and time of posting.
As a Cultural Heritage concentration with personal career aspirations to continue working in archives, a few other listservs I love are ArchivesGig (https://archivesgig.com), which has postings for archival positions from all over the country (as well as some international positions), and MUSE Weekly (https://www.museumstudies.udel.edu/museweekly/), which is run by the University of Delaware and provides a weekly email with information on open jobs, internships, conferences, announcements, and museum news. These listservs (as well as others like them) are so helpful when you approach the sea of job postings on big sites like LinkedIn, which have great postings but can take more time to navigate.
Additionally, a lot of organizations in our field have job postings for members and non-members alike! Some of those organizations’ job boards require logins or membership to the organization for access, but a great perk of membership to those organizations is the network of other LIS professionals who want to support you as you enter the field. A few organizations that I’m a part of have their own job boards or email listservs, including the American Library Association (joblist.ala.org), the Music Library Association (https://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/page/JobsAndCareers), and the New England Library Association (https://nela.mcjobboard.net/jobs/), all of which are great tools to find open LIS positions. All of the job boards I’ve listed here are open to the public, but I’d highly recommend looking for ways to be active in these organizations (and others!) to learn from and share your work with other students or professionals in the field.
A lot of hard work goes into getting ready for post-grad life, and I’ll talk more about that process as I go through it! This semester, I’m finishing up my last two SLIS classes (LIS 440 – Archival Access and Use with Prof. Kathy Wisser and LIS 453 – Collections Development and Management with Prof. Amy Pattee, both of which are great so far!) and am working in an academic archive as well as in SLIS Graduate Admissions, so I’ll have plenty to share with you on school, work, and life in Boston as my time in grad school comes to a close. Good luck with the start of your classes, and I can’t wait to share more with you all over the course of the spring semester!